www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

All about Internet Relay Chat

InspIRCd 2.0.5 Vulnerability [Updated]

There has been a vulnerability reported in InspIRCd 2.0.5 and possibly other versions of the IRC daemon.

The problem lies in the buffer handling of dns.cpp, can be triggered by remote users and might result in arbitrary code execution according to the advisory.

 

There currently is a workaround in the form of a config setting, namely to set

to yes.

 

There also have been pull requests on GitHub by Atheme developer nenolod which fix the underlying code, although those – as of now – haven’t been pulled in yet.

 

The fixes above have been pulled in and the official sources have been moved from Gitorious to GitHub.

 

Due to the serious nature of the vulnerability, watch the development of this closely and even though there currently are no reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

 

The advisory can be found here and one of the temporary InspIRCd websites (which is currently still down after a break-in into ChatSpike/InspIRCd servers) can be found here.

 

We’ll keep this entry updated on any new developments regarding this issue.

IRC Wiki – 2nd Anniversary

2 years ago, the IRC-Wiki has been created to provide a central place for all things that relate to IRC.

Some might argue that Wikipedia is a better place for that but as some people can assess it isn’t due to their idiotic strict notability guidelines.

 

Fast forward 2 years and IRC Wiki is still thriving and the only one remaining from the 3 that have been mentioned in that past article. One of them has merged into IRC Wiki soon after the article has been written and to date the Wiki consists of 650 pages and 5000 edits in total.

 

About 180 users have contributed to it, though the majority of editors is due to a new feature: network pages.

There, registered networks can put up information about it, integrate statistics  from SearchIRC and Netsplit.de and much more.

 

IRC Wiki Network Listing Page

IRC Wiki Network Listing Page

 

In the early days, IRC-Wiki was using LionWiki and migrated to MediaWiki due to user requests for features that are only present in MediaWiki. That move was done manually, article-by-article by Bertrum and Trixar_za.

Even though that was a labour-intensive task, Trixar_za regards it as “the best decision they made because of the sheer number of MediaWiki extensions, especially the security related ones – considering how many Wikis are overrun with spam these days”.

 

Today, the Wiki holds lots of information for all kind of IRCds, IRC clients and software for IRC networks but there is still a list of articles that are yet to be created – not to mention there’s always room to improve and expand current articles.

 

So, if you haven’t yet: browse over to IRC-Wiki and help them out, be it by adding your network to their index or filling the Wiki with information!

IRCjr – An IRC Client for DOS

There are IRC clients for every platform and every OS – wait, really every platform, every OS?

 

Lets see:

Windows? More than you can handle..

OS X? Sure

Linux/UNIX? Of course

 

…and more – i’ll spare you listing every platform there’s an IRC client for.

 

But.. what about DOS you say? Yes, yes – there is one: IRCjr.

 

It’s not only a proof-of-concept but is a fully-featured client. It supports CTCP messages such as /me and /version, has timestamps, logging to disk, a user-configurable scrollback buffer and supports every display from MDA/monochrome up to VGA resolutions and colors.

 

DOS IRC Client IRCjr running in DOSBox

DOS IRC Client IRCjr running in DOSBox

 

As you can see from the screenshot it sports a split-screen layout and according to its website it’ll run even on “the oldest 8088 based systems” from DOS 2.1 and newer.

 

Being in multiple channels and private messages at the same time is no problem – IRCjr is even compatible with multiple monitors, although it can only use one at a time.

 

Since DOS is pretty much obsolete these days and being asked about the reason why he wrote a program for a dead platform the programmer, Michael  Brutman, said that he had rediscovered the fun in retro computing and since all TCP/IP stacks for DOS sucked, he wrote his own and the first application he developed for it was IRCjr.

 

One of the main concerns while programming was stability and according to Michael Brutman it’s really stable and can be left running even in very busy channels such as #ubuntu on freenode without problems.

 

On the feature-side he said that he’s looking to bring multi-server support and maybe mIRC color codes into the client but sadly Unicode support is pretty much ruled out as most of the old hardware can’t load fonts.

 

So if you’re a retro computing enthusiast and addicted to IRC – give it a go and let us know what you think about it in the comments!

 

More details about the setup, configuration and capabilities of IRCjr can be found on the IRCjr website.

Mac OS X IRC Client Textual Version 2.1 Hits AppStore

The OS X IRC client Textual just got released as version 2.1 in the Mac OS AppStore.

 

What has begun as a fork of LimeChat has quickly evolved into something very distinct and usable, which was a main point of critique with the original.

Textual Mac OS X IRC Client

Textual Mac OS X IRC Client

Textuals’ feature-set is really complete: themes, plugins and an extensive range of configuration options.

One neat feature is the inline display of graphics and YouTube video thumbnails so you know what you’re going to click on even before you click.

What really sets Textual apart from other clients on OS X is its stability – crashes and lockups are really far and few between, if any. Attaching to a bouncer with log-replay doesn’t take longer than a few seconds even for a channel # in the high double-digits.

 

Textual is a fully Lion-compatible and also supports fullscreen IRCing so you’re no longer distracted by work when you’re chatting with your buddies ;)

 

Since 2.1 it now supports SASL plaintext auth, IPv6, regular expression support for highlights and it already complies with Apples’ new sandboxing requirement for Apps distributed via the AppStore.

 

The client is a paid-for app and costs $4.99, is available as a Trial version and even can be built by yourself from source.

 

AppStore link: Textual

Changelog

IRC Defender arbitrary code execution exploit

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.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove