The denizens of internet troll hive 4chan.org launched an attack on Gawker Media's servers at noon Eastern today, apparently unhappy we wrote about how they coordinated the harassment of an 11-year-old girl. We survived the onslaught, but 4chan isn't done.

"We need to silence them," wrote a user of 4chan's notorious /b/ message board about an hour and a half before the attack, "unless they remove ALL articles mentioning 4chan" (NSFW link here).

This apparently isn't the first time /b/ users have gone after a media outlet; we've read members mocking Fox News on the site, and claiming their attacks on the news network's website resulted in no more Fox stories about 4chan offshoot group "Anonymous's" war on Scientology. Whether that's true or just more clueless /b/ chest thumping, there are users of the site who clearly want to intimidate any critics. "Time to remind the world that we don't get fucked with" was today's rallying cry (NSFW link).

Things didn't quite workout as planned; our tech team noticed some major issues around noon, and the site did seem to slow, but as of yet hasn't crashed. As our attackers noticed on /b/:

Anonymous 07/19/10(Mon)12:13:13 No.254365XXX
 Still works for me... fail.[...]

Anonymous 07/19/10(Mon)12:21:28 No.254367XXX
 This really should have been planned out better...[...]

Anonymous 07/19/10(Mon)12:31:23 No.254370XXX
 This is one of the biggest fails I've seen in years.[...]

weaksause banon 07/19/10(Mon)12:57:23 No.254377XXX
 gawker is still posting ozzy snorting icecream. the their admin is laughing at /b/

And from the live chat 4chan set up to discuss the attack:

[10:02] Topic: Gawker's Worst Nightmare
[10:02] large: gawker > /b/
[10:02] large: =[
[10:02] anen: :'( sad but true

Now 4chaners have shifted gears and launched a harass attack against our man Adrian Chen, who has been carefully documenting how 4chaners helped send an 11 year old into police protection and a safe house. They're posting Chen's personal information, including addresses, phone numbers, social networking accounts, etc. as part of a and have already started spamming his email account. Here's one of the active harassment attempts against Adrian, click to enlarge:

Harassment and hack attacks: What a very effective way for the script kiddies hanging around /b/ today to prove they are not "summerfags," as senior 4chan members call them, but effective and persuasive humans who will inevitably win critics and the rest of the world over to their side. Dorks. We're demoting you to 3chan for the rest of the summer.

Also for the rest of the summer, we're encouraging everyone to write about 4chan without hesitation. As always, the best response to dumb young guys trying to intimidate their enemies online is to inundate them with targets and refuse to be intimidated. And if any of you sad 4chaners have a problem with that, you know how to reach me (my email address is spelled n-i-c-k at g-a-w-k-e-r dot com).