The creator of Kiwi Farms, a hub for online harassment campaigns, says the forum site was hacked and users' emails, passwords, and IP addresses were compromised
Dan Goodin / Ars Technica :
Context & Ripple Effects
Kiwi Farms has spent years in the crosshairs: NBC profiles in September 2022 tied the forum run by former 8chan admin Josh Moon to doxxing, swatting, and harassment campaigns, and after Cloudflare dropped it the site survived by scattering its posters across Telegram and Discord while activists keep pressing to banish it entirely.
Now the site's own user database is the leaked artifact. Forum databases have a history of ending up dumped publicly — the Cracked.to breach saw its user base posted at rival Raidforums with IPs, emails, and DMs exposed — and Kiwi Farms' trove is more sensitive than most, because IP addresses and emails are exactly the raw material its own threads weaponize against targets.
First-order effects
- Every registered Kiwi Farms user now faces the exposure the forum inflicts on others: their email addresses, passwords, and IP addresses are compromised, and Moon must scramble to contain a breach of his own infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- The same doxxing playbook Kiwi Farms threads run on targets like Clara Sorrenti and Alejandra Caraballo can now be pointed back at the site's own posters, whose identities and locations are recoverable from the leak — and activists campaigning against the forum gain leverage without lifting a finger.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, fringe forums that survive deplatforming by going distributed keep operating but lose the security discipline of mainstream hosts, making breaches — not takedowns — an increasingly common way these communities' members get unmasked.
The trend: Harassment forums that outlast infrastructure bans are increasingly undone by their own operational failures, with leaked user data doing what moderators and hosts refused to.