Hackers have somehow infiltrated cat-GIF-meme-photo-sharing site Imgur to direct overwhelming volumes of traffic at 4chan, the freewheeling forum that hosts some of the Web’s darker conversations.

Naturally, this problem was uncovered over at Reddit.

According to this thread on Reddit:

“When an Imgur image is loaded from /r/4chan, imgur loads a bunch of images from 4chan’s content delivery network or 8chan (unclear at this point, might be both), which causes a DDoS to those sites.”

Essentially, if someone clicks a Imgur link on /r/4chan then it opens up about 500 links from 4chan.org/8chan.

While user Backfromshadowban described it as a distributed denial of service attack, others disagreed with that characterization. User ItsMeCaptainMurphy explained:

“This isn’t a DDOS. It’s targeting 8chan users and leaving javascript code in their local storage that causes their browsers ping back to a command and control server each time they hit an 8chan page. Thus far the C&C server hasn’t sent out any commands (or stopped issuing commands before this was discovered). Over the evening whoever authored this has been updating and changing their code. It only effects very specific imgur images/pages. Why is not yet known.”

In any case, it appears that Imgur is aware of the problem. Earlier today, they tweeted: