IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

William “nenolod” Pitcock, founder and long-time operator of the DroneBL DNSBL, announced via a posting on their mailinglist that he’ll discontinue his work on the service “due to time and emotional constraints” “effective immediately”.

DroneBL DNS Blacklist Logo

The DNS Blacklist is one of the few that is especially meant to be used for IRC Networks.

He writes that coming to the decision to quit having an active role was not an easy process but he deems the project mature enough that the community “can steer it’s future development focus” and notes that he’ll continue to provide hosting for the blacklist until the community has made appropriate “alternative hosting arrangements”.

wsIRC, a new webchat client, is now at version 1.0 – their first release version.

wsIRC Channelview

As you can see from the screenshot, the most important functions are already there: right-click menus for miscellaneous functions such as /WHOIS or /PRIVMSG’ing users, a Channel-Central to handle the most basic modes and bans. Registering your nick or channel through a simple popup is implemented and the usual buttons for smileys, font-color and style are available too.

The folks at DroneBL discovered and analyzed a router-based botnet that is suspected to have DDoS’ed them for about 2 weeks.

The bot software, named “psyb0t”, is the “first known botnet based on exploiting consumer network devices, such as home routers and cable/dsl modems”.

Exploiting routers is in some cases more “useful” than infecting PC’s – because “most people will keep the router on 24/7″ as opposed to their computers which “most people shut down [...] in the evening before they go to bed, or when they leave the office” nenolod writes.
In his paper (which was written back in 2006 and at that time he’s been “called looney for”) he also mentions another reason why targeting SOHO routers is a good idea: