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Monthly Archives: October 2005

Annual Celebration of Network Staff Stupidity at Chatspike

Code mixups, typo’s or any other error from time to time has an effect greater then anticipated by the staff member who performed the error.

“Human error happened and banned everyone from the network,” Chatspike staff member w00t starts to explain to IRC-Junkie. Chatspike staff member Brain typoed a hostmask and the entire network was recognized as a litmus trojan, and banned as consequence. The whole network had to be restarted in order to fix the error.“We’ve decided to make it somewhat of an annual celebration of staff stupidity,” w00t continued. “We have designated October the 28th ‘Blame Brain Day’, and it’s become a network wide holiday and celebration, It also serves as a reminder to users that just because we may have power, all opers are still human and prone to screw ups.”

The day also includes a contest where users can send in images or video’s depicting Brain making his now annually celebrated error. Amongst the prices are a virtual host, non-expiring nick and the ability to see users who /whois you. More information about the contest can be found on the Chatspike website.

IRC Might See Flux of Former Yahoo Users

Yahoo announced that their chat rooms will be closed for people aged under eighteen. This was the result after an agreement between Yahoo and New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer. “We need to be vigilant to protect our children,” said Spitzer, motivating his reasons for this agreement.

As part of the agreement Yahoo also closed chat rooms (yes, they are called rooms instead of channels there ;) ) with names like Teen Girls for Older Fat Men, as they would be promoting indecent behavior. According to Spitzer an investigator who entered a chat room as an 14 year old girl got 35 sexual proposals within 25 minutes.

It is believed that the people now cut off from Yahoo will either use false information while signing up, or move to those IRC networks where traditionally little or no moderation takes place at all.

mIRC.net Experiencing Server Problems

mIRC.net is a well known mIRC scripting website and IRC community  and is unavailable since last Thursday already.

“I am not 100% sure why  mirc.net is down,” mIRC.net admin magic explained to IRC-Junkie. “It happened when i logged out of the machine through ssh. It went nuts and seems cpu went 100% load. I’ve been unable to login to the server since then.”

Magic has been trying to contact the admin of the hosting location since, unfortunately without success so far.

Zombie Network Rolled Up in Netherlands (upt)

The Dutch police have arrested three men, ages 19, 22 and 27 year-old, who were running a network of compromised machines that was counting around 100000 total.

The 19 year-old is considered the prime suspect and the coder of the virus used, W32.Toxbot. The virus was first noticed at the start of this year.

An IRC channel was used to control the bots, and send them commands. They were used in DDoS attacks, and information was collected from online banking services (PayPal) and eBay accounts with the aid of a key-logger.

The group is thought of to be responsible for at least 1 extortion attempt of a company which is located in the US.

At the time of arresting the suspects, the police confiscated computers, administration, a bank account, cash money and a sportscar.

21 Oct 2005 Update: As Dutch media now reports, the number of infectees was not around 100,000, but rather 1,500,000 machines.