IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Daniel Jess Moore from Wellington, New Zealand was identified to be the operator and gatekeeper of an international network that was exchanging and distributing child porn via an IRC channel.

New Zealand Childporn Peddler: Daniel Jess Moore

The channel reportedly had over 100 active participants which traded “many millions of child sex abuse pictures and movies exclusively between its members”. Moore, along with an unnamed US man, were considered the operators and gatekeepers of said channel, employing on- and offline cryptography to conceal their criminal operation.

GeekShed, the “free to use and family-friendly Internet Relay Chat network”, is currently suffering from a large scale DDoS attack that cripples their infrastructure consisting of 15 servers.

Even though those servers are in datacentres that offer DDoS-protection and are hosted with a number of large backbones they cannot seem to withstand the sheer volume of ICMP and UDP traffic directed at them.

Some of the servers have been null-routed by the hosting providers, others have been null-routed by GeekShed staff to “prevent damage to other machines and customers” according to network owner Phil.

Yesterday a group consisting of major Australian ISPs – amongst them are Optus, Telstra, Vodafone, AAPT, Virgin, Hutchison 3G as well as Facebook, Google and Microsoft – announced that they prepare “a voluntary industry code to come into force this year” which could mean that “Computers infected with viruses could be “expelled” from the internet”.

The Internet Industry Association, which is made up of over 200 ISP and IT-related companies, is preparing that code in response to an ultimatum of the federal government.

A 40-year-old channel operator of a child pornography IRC channel received 8 years prison.

An investigation led by Interpol resulted in the arrest of 25 channel members worldwide spread over 10 countries. The channel operator, Brian Martin from Oregon USA, has now been sentenced to 8 years in prison. On his computer more then 5,000 images of child pornography have been found.

The channel served as a trading place where members exchanged newly found child pornography files, including video files.

Martin requested to remain free pending an appeal of his conviction, but  U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty denied that request.

The Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the sentence against the first convicted spammer in the USA, saying anti-spam laws do not violate freedom of speech.

Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C was one of the world top spammers in 2003. The case he was convicted in was built on a single action where he produced 53,000 emails in 3 days in July 2003. He was sentenced to 9 years in jail.

Jaynes said in his defense that his spamming actions do not fall under anti-spam legislation because of freedom of speech guaranteed under the First Amendment.