www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Elmaron of Eloxoph updates WeIRCd to version 0.7.5.

The update includes nifty new things like a settings pane for the Windows-based version where you can change settings without having to edit the config-file and it now supports INVITE. He also added a line to WHOIS, showing the IP you’re connecting from.

WeIRCd settings pane

He notes that though there are no security fixes in this release but a memleak has been fixed so “updating is still advised.”

The download can be found here.

The IRC bouncer project ZNC has a new stable release, version 0.078.

ZNC is an advanced bouncer that has module support, can encrypt all traffic between the servers and clients with SSL and also has a nice webinterface for easy configuration and administration.

Other features are detaching from the BNC with playback support, it has a partyline, can bounce DCCs too and you even can connect with multiple clients to one user, sharing the same username on IRC then.

The changelog is rather long and includes fixes, feature additions and a few internal changes.

What many have suspected has now been confirmed – the root cause of the many netsplits on the freenode IRC network during the last days have been caused by ongoing DDoS attacks on their sponsors.

Freenode staffer JonathanD writes in their blogpost that they are experiencing a “heavy DDoS against several locations at which some of our servers are hosted. The attack is ongoing and cause a lot of disruption, both to users of the network and unfortunately to projects/companies/individuals whos infrastructure is hosted at the same locations as us” but also writes that they are “working hard to try curb the attacks as best they can.”

Atheme, an IRC services package used by many mainstream networks – the largest being Freenode – is updated to version 5.0.

Aside from a host of fixes it now also provides BotServ and HostServ services.

Developer nenolod hints of another upcoming big addition: “There is also a web interface for atheme coming out on friday” but “it’s not quite done yet.”

We managed to get a preview of whats to be expected and grabbed a few screenshots of the webinterface in action:

Channel management from the web

Sending memos from the web

Despite being already over 5 years old, SDBot and its variants are still going strong and haven’t followed the decline that other similar threats have taken.

Using IRC as a control channel for botnets is one of the older, possibly even the oldest method around – the newer bots most of the time use either P2P or HTTP for their control, allowing them to be stealthier and harder to trace back than their IRC-using counterparts.