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IRC Defender arbitrary code execution exploit

phrozen77 — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:18:15 +0000

Yesterday, news broke that there is an arbitrary code execution exploit within the still popular IRC security service IRC Defender which is, according to the reporter, being actively exploited.

The flaw is said to be within the InspIRCd link module for which a patched version exists, but according to the original post to the IRC-Security mailinglist there are more flaws within the InspIRCd link module and also within the UnrealIRCd link module.

The original poster on the mailinglist suggests to get rid of IRC Defender immediately and to replace it with something else (have a look at Omega Security Services) and also to check for signs of recent intrusions which have taken place on or after 15th November. He also urges to look out for rogue entries in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and look for suspicious processes.

So far, at least three networks seem to have been exploited due to this flaw – the highest profile victim so far seems to be the hack of the AnonOps network which also seems to have been possible due to that flaw – contrary to the rumored Anope 0-day.

Original post on the IRC-Security mailinglist is here (needs registration).

Thanks to alyx for the tip etc!

The patched inspircd12.pm link module can be obtained from here.

IRC Defender arbitrary code execution exploit is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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

UnrealIRCd 3.2.9 – New stable version after 2 years

phrozen77 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:46:45 +0000

UnrealIRCd, the IRCd that still dominates the usage statistics of all IRCds, has seen another stable release and is now at version 3.2.9.

After 2 release candidates and with 212 changes and bugfixes – almost the same amount as the last three stable releases combined – among which is a “substantial amount of new features” as Syzop writes in their announcement.

He thanks everyone that made this release possible but especially mentions binki who did a “considerable amount of work to make this release possible”.

And indeed, there is a large amount of changes – for example:

Extended Bans (new modes introduced, ban stacking behaviour)
Extended Invite Exceptions / Invex
New Channelmode +Z which works in conjunction with +z (SSL only) and is set once every joined user is on SSL which might not be the case during netsplits/-joins
Remote MOTD support
Remote includes caching so that an old version of a remote include is loaded in case the webserver containing the include is down
/rehash -global – rehashes all servers at once
STARTTLS – connect to a “regular” port SSL encrypted
IPv6 clones detection support, defaults to /64

A small excerpt of the bugs that have been fixed:

Low connection frequencies (connfreq) no longer pose a problem due to reworking the corresponding code
IPv6 related fixes
an obscure crash bug that only occured rarely on outgoing connects

Work on UnrealIRCd 3.3 already has begun and is, according to development plans, the replacement for the often retried and ultimately failed rewrite which was to be released as UnrealIRCd 4.

The release announcement can be found here and the full changelog for changes since UnrealIRCd 3.2.8.1 is here (you need to scroll all the way down).

UnrealIRCd 3.2.9 – New stable version after 2 years is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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

Hybrid releases 7.3.0

Kottizen — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 10:05:18 +0000

Earlier this week, Jon Lusky released a new version of ircd-hybrid. The version number has now reached 7.3.0. Among the changes you find a new Bulgarian translation, a fixed IPv6 implementation and channel modes O and S for opers-only respective SSL/TLS-only clients. Server administrators now get to choose whether they want to use SSLv3 or TLSv1 to secure connections. All spy-notice modules that previously covered reports for usage of STATS, TRACE, MOTD and ADMIN have been replaced by server-sided notices. The old LazyLinks concept has now been removed, as it was half broken. The WATCH command known from UnrealIRCd and Bahamut has been added. In addition to that, a few minor cleanups and bugs leading to crashes have been fixed.

Hybrid is used together with Ratbox (which is a fork) and CSIRCd on both EFnet and IRCsource. It has been forked many times and it’s known for its stability and quality of code.

By looking at the SVN repository it seems like the developer team behind Hybrid is working towards a 8.0 release, featuring better services support while still keeping simplicity.

Hybrid releases 7.3.0 is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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

A Day on QuakeNet

phrozen77 — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:27:11 +0000

A nice visualization of a normal day on the “largest internet relay chat Network in the world” brings us meeb of QuakeNet:

He goes on to write that the video shows “one day of activity, 24 hours, midnight to midnight in UTC, on the QuakeNet IRC network summarised into a 12 minute data visualisation” and that “each dot represents a new user connecting to the network, there are some 400 new connections per minute on average in this visualisation”.

The data which the video was rendered of has been “collected strictly anonymously at a high level” by a network service that “already stores connection data in memory” meeb emphasizes.

Talking about the technical aspects of the video, meeb explains that the “final visualisation was produced using processing” – the total amount of data processed was 14GB that took about 8 hours on a fast PC according to meeb.

The resulting 1080p video was about 8GB in size for the 12 minute visualization and re-rendering that into a h264 video took “another 5-6 hours”.

For more information, read the original post here.

And yes, now i’m curious on how such a visualization would look like for other networks

A Day on QuakeNet 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.