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Mibbit has been compromised

Kottizen — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 10:15:11 +0000

On August 14 a cracker group claiming to be “hackers” named HTP broke into Mibbit, the popular web chat client for IRC. According to their temporarily “rescue” blog the break-in only affected their IRC network, their primary blog and their Wiki. NickServ passwords in clear text were released later the same day by the HTP, as well as personal information regarding several staff members. Both their IRC O-line passwords as well as their NickServ passwords, home addresses and phone numbers were published to the public via a range of file hosting services, and Pastebin.

Something perhaps even more concerning is that the group has revealed not only channel logs, but logs of private messages. It appears like Mibbit has been logging what people have said in PM to each other over their network. According to official statements, this was only a test. Some people have heard that Mibbit has been logging all messages going through their systems. Mibbit has never logged anything, unless a user wants to enable logging. The leaked message logs were captured by a staff member, and not by Mibbit’s system, according to official statements. While this is fully legal, the level of ethicality has been questioned.

The web IRC client that can be used to connect to almost any other network, which is what made them famous, has not been affected. It is operating normally.

All NickServ passwords were stored in plain text, and that raised a concern for those who are interested and engaged in enforcing security. According to staff member pottsi password hashing was not done because that would “means sendpass and getpass would not work”. Another staff member, Joshua, claimed that password hashing was not done because it was too much work to convert all passwords. This has however proven to be incorrect, at least if they used a plain copy of Anope. In Anope’s module database, there is a module called enc_switchover. It’s fairly easy to migrate from one encryption method, or none, to another, using that module. In addition to that, the Anope module ns_resetpass will allow users to reset their passwords despite encryption taking place.

Many people, especially IRC administrators, are now questioning Mibbit’s reliability and some are considering to block access from the web service, just like one of the largest networks, freenode, did a couple of years ago. This is mainly due to the question whether they log messages there too, which would go against many networks’ policies.

The Mibbit team is now working very hard to bring all services back up again. At the time of writing, ChanServ and NickServ on their network is down and staff members are forced to use /samode if they need to get op. They advice everyone who had a NickServ account registered in April or earlier, this year, to change password.

Mibbit has been compromised is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

ii – A Filesystem-based IRC Client

phrozen77 — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:22:36 +0000

There are many different IRC clients out there and no matter what your preferences are, you’re almost guaranteed to find one that will suit your needs.

Most clients today provide some sort of graphical user interface or come with an ASCII-based interface. And while the latter, CLI-based clients, are commonly thought to be the most basic variant of an IRC client, i was surprised to find a client that manages to be even more plain: ii or IRC IT.

ii is a “minimalist FIFO and filesystem-based IRC client”, meaning every channel, private message and other server communication is represented by a directory containing an in and an out file.

Even though its sourcecode is just under 500 lines, it supports the most basic commands like joining and parting, changing nickname and setting topics. All other commands currently not understood by ii can be written as per the RFC and will get sent directly to the server then.

Using standard Linux/Unix commandline-tools like echo, cat, tail and grep you can control IRC IT which almost behaves like a normal IRC client then.

Join a channel? Sure, just echo “/j #yourchannelname” > servernamedir/in and you’ll join that channel, creating an out file you can monitor with tail -f.

ii Channelview

After a little while, your directory structure will look like this:

ii Treeview

Users of the vim editor who always looked envious at the Emacs editor because of its built-in IRC client ERC – fret not: This blog-post details how to configure vim to be used as an IRC client in combination with ii.

So if you feel like trying something new, grab ii from here and after a fast and hassle-free compiler-run you’re up and running – Who knows, maybe you’ve got a favourite new IRC client?

ii – A Filesystem-based IRC Client is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

KVIrc 3.x and 4.x Remote Command Execution Vulnerability

phrozen77 — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 15:03:19 +0000

All current versions of the KVIrc IRC client contain a remotely exploitable command execution vulnerability, including builds of KVIrc 4 from subversion up to revision 4692 as well as the older 3.x versions.

The bug, triggered by inserting carriage returns (r) into DCC GET commands, can be used to execute every command the IRCd understands in the context of the user running the vulnerable client instance.

To check if your version is exploitable you can either take a look at the “About KVIrc” tab under “Help” and check the revision or execute the following command on IRC:

/echo $version

To make matters worse, whole channels can be exploited at once if they don’t have a mode set that disallows CTCPing them.

A quick workaround is to execute the following command, effectively preventing those “failed” DCC handshakes to be notified and disabling the bug:

/option boolNotifyFailedDccHandshakes 0

To see if you’ve already been exploited you can take a look in your server window and search for lines that look similar to these:

[01:27:46] Processing DCC GET PRIVMSG #kvirc :I’m owned
request from ATTACKER [ATTACKER@HOSTNAME] (DCC GETrPRIVMSG40#kvirc40:I’m40ownedr)
[01:27:46] Unable to process the above request: Unknown DCC type ‘GET PRIVMSG #KVIRC :I’M OWNED ‘, Ignoring and notifying failure

Updated builds of KVIrc are available on their homepage – some distributions also already have updated builds in their repository. If you can’t update because your distribution is not among the one with updated builds, the workaround helps to not fall prey to any possible attackers.

Original report on KVIrc bugtracker
Advisory on Secunia.com

KVIrc 3.x and 4.x Remote Command Execution Vulnerability is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

Smuxi 0.7.2.1 is out, extends CTCP support & adds ignore filters

phrozen77 — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 13:18:24 +0000

Smuxi, the “Smart MUltipleXed” IRC client was updated to version 0.7.2.1 on Friday.

The new version contains 13 new features, fixes 29 bugs and is now available in 4 new languages – Portuguese, Danish, Finnish and Catalan, of which the latter two are currently only partially translated. Six already existing translations have been updated and project lead meebey asks interested parties to contribute and further improve them.

Interesting new features include the freshly added linemarker which inserts a red line where you last looked into the channel, a private message window or the Twitter tab – see the below screenshot:

Smuxi 0.7.2 Main Window on Linux

Even more interesting is the new filter capability this release introduces: You now can ignore events and messages using both regular expressions as well as wildcards, giving you quite a bit of flexibility on which events you’d like to dismiss.

Smuxi 0.7.2 Filter Preferences on Linux

The titlebar of the client has gotten some work too and now shows activewindowname @ network – programname which is useful if you want to see at a glance where the text you’re typing is going to – who didn’t post or paste something into the totally wrong window at the most inappropiate time yet?

CTCP support has been expanded too and the client now replies to CTCP TIME, CTCP FINGER and CTCP USERINFO. Probably of more practical use is the new logging function – currently Smuxi can log to file and uses a logformat that is almost similar to the one of irssi – besides the timestamp which prepended to entries in full.

For the future, more logging backends are planned and may include “SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL and such” says developer meebey. Also on the roadmap for a 0.8 release is a plugin architecture but it “remains to be seen” which features this will support.

The complete list of changes, additions and fixes can be found in the 0.7.2 roadmap and if you got curious you can grab the download for Windows and Linux from here.

Thanks for the tip and the pictures go to meebey himself!

Smuxi 0.7.2.1 is out, extends CTCP support & adds ignore filters is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

IRC Statistics Software Comparison

phrozen77 — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:11:49 +0000

Today we shall have a look at the various possibilities available for statistics of activity on IRC, should you decide you want to have some pretty graphs detailing the happenings in a channel or on a whole network.

Most programs presented in this article parse logfiles generated by a variety of IRC clients, with the exception of phpDenora/Denora which needs to be run as a network service to gather its stats. However, both solutions can supplement one another as one may gather and display information that the other does or even can not.

All screenshots show results generated from the same logfile so you can directly compare the output of each software – only the output of phpDenora is taken from a live network and does not represent the numbers shown in the other screenshots. Also, it should be noted that all programs have been tested in their default configuration and most provide a host of options that may output even more detailed and fancier statistics so YMMV.

mIRCStats

Language: Pascal
License: Shareware (Full Version starting from 12$/€)
Type: Log-parser
Logformats: irssi, mIRC, Trillian, Eggdrop, irssi, HydraIRC, ircle, BNC, miau, Winbot, XChat
Output: HTML
Support: Forum

mIRCStats IRC Statistics

mIRCStats is one of the older and more well-known packages out there but also the only one in this comparison that is licensed as shareware. However, with paying you get access to even more advanced output and graphing options and put food on the developers table

The statistics it outputs leave nothing to be desired, not even in the shareware version. mIRCStats supports a wide variety of IRC clients it can parse logs from and adding new parsers is trivial – just edit a textfile that defines how certain events “look” in the log. There even is an option to automatically upload the generated files via FTP to a server of your choice so the statistics will always be up-to-date.

One downside of mIRCStats is that it is a Windows-only program which means you’ll need an always-on Windows machine that will parse the log and generate the stats if you plan on periodic updates of your stats.

pisg (Perl IRC Statistics Generator)

Language: Perl
License: GPL
Type: Log-parser
Logformats: XChat, mIRC, Eggdrop, BitchX, irssi, virc98, dancer, Trillian, Grufti, mbot, Winbot, zcbot, muh, Energymech, ircII, psyBNC, ircle, infobot, axur, bobot++, oer, perlbot, Vision, pircbot, KVIrc, HydraIRC, sirc, moobot, supybot, blootbot, dircproxy, Konversation
Output: HTML
Support: #pisg

pisg IRC Statistics

pisg also is a logfile parser and, as the acronym suggests, is written in Perl which makes it multiplatform / multiOS.

The statistics it generates in its default configuration are detailed but beyond that pisg is very extendable and provides many options to further customize the output and statistics parsed and graphed by it – the documentation explains most if not all possible settings in detail. If you are using a client whose logformat is not in its extensive list of supported and supplied parsers you can create your own provided you have some knowledge of regular expressions.

With pisg, the parsing of logfiles can be automated by adding the command to cron or Task Scheduler and if you want to generate statistics for multiple channels you can easily do so by configuring it via its config-file instead of passing commandline arguments to the executable.

risg (Ruby IRC Statistics Generator)

Language: Ruby
License: MIT
Type: Log-parser
Logformats: irssi
Output: HTML, XML, Console
Support: #risg

risg IRC Statistics

risg, short for “Ruby IRC Statistics Generator”, also is a multiplatform / multiOS logfile parsing statistics generator programmed in Ruby.

Currently it only parses logfiles that are in irssis’ default format however parser-support is modular and one could create his own parser based on the supplied one for irssi.

Statistics graphed by risg are a bit plain and not as detailed as they could be, but given the low version number and the fact that the software still is considered to be in an “experimental stage of development” things might as well change in the future. The lack of documentation besides a basic setup and usage guide is probably also attributable to the early stage the software is in but all in all risg has potential.

Being a commandline-driven program, risgs’ statistics generation can be automated and its output can be modified, used and mangled limited only by its users imagination.

superseriousstats

Language: PHP
License: BSD
Type: Log-parser
Logformats: Eggdrop, irssi, mIRC
Output: HTML, MySQL
Support: #sss-support

SuperSeriousStats IRC Statistics

superseriousstats is of the “logfile parsing” variety too but, to add another programming language to the mix, is written entirely in PHP. It uses a MySQL database for data storage which opens up quite a few possibilities on how and where you can use it besides the full statistics website.

The graphs and statistics sss generates aren’t overly fancy (did you expect anything else from software that calls itself “serious”?) but some customization options are provided so you can still tweak and fiddle with them. As with the previous packages, superseriousstats is to be used from the commandline and can be executed with any scheduling daemon – provided you have a recent version of PHP installed on the platform of your choice.

Extending the number of logformats / clients supported is just a matter of creating an appropiate parser for which you’d need to have at least a basic understanding of regular expressions.

Denora / phpDenora

Language: C / PHP
License: GPL
Type: Network Service
Logformats: -
Output: HTML, XML, MySQL
Support: #denora

phpDenora IRC Statistics

The combination of Denora and phpDenora is unique in that it is the only package in this comparison that must be run as a network service to gather its statistics.

The upside of this is that it can gather statistics and details the other packages can’t provide but on the flipside also means that you will need to have access to the IRC networks configuration or convince one of the admins to install it for you – otherwise you’re out of luck.

The statistics and graphs phpDenora displays are multifaceted & good-looking and due it being a network service it displays statistics for the whole network, not just one or a few channels. Denora introduces StatServ, a pseudoclient like NickServ, to the network that is able to display a selection of statistics in channel messages or notices to you.

Data parsed by Denora is available in a MySQL database or XML which makes it an ideal candidate for modeling the output your way. It should be noted that the successor for phpDenora, called MagIRC, is already in the works but is not anywhere near production-ready and therefore not suitable for most IRC nets.

Verdict:

All solutions generate useful and appealing results – one maybe a bit more than the other but in the end it’s all a matter of taste and largely depends on what you want to achieve.

If you’re looking to customize the output or scope of the graphs you should definately pick the solution that is written in the language you’re already familiar with or comfortable to learn.

What do you use to provide statistics on your network or channel?

IRC Statistics Software Comparison is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.