Dealing with spam is something every IRC network had to do in the past, present or even maybe in the future.
If it is somebody that is trying to give your network a bad name, a trojan horse that tries to infect your users or just someone that tries to annoy you and your users doesn’t quite matter, spam probably has been an issue as long as IRC has existed.
Luckily, there are quite a few methods and ways to counter-act on it.
Another day, another IRC client vulnerability…
Researchers have found a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Quassel IRC client.
Quoted from the projects homepage:
Well, looks like 0.3.0.2 was not the last 0.3.0 release after all. coekie found an issue with CTCP handling in Quassel Core that allows attackers to send arbitrary IRC messages on your behalf. This issue is present in all versions prior to 0.3.0.3 and Git older than October 26th (rev. d7a0381).
Details on the vulnerability are provided on the webpage of the exploits author:
No, not only mIRC has bugs 
For the second time, after a similar vulnerability in 2007, the irc:// URI-handler of KVIrc 3.4.0 is vulnerable to exploitation.
For successful exploitation of the security hole the user needs to be tricked to follow a maliciously crafted irc:// link – “Failed exploit attempts may cause denial-of-service conditions.” at least, or might even enable the attacker “to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the affected application.” - which we all know is Administrator for 95% of all Windows machines.
Little over one month after the last release of the popular IRC-client, a new version becomes public.
According to the website the update is due to a security flaw concerning “very long nicknames on non-standard servers” and it is therefore a recommended upgrade for everyone.
Also, it seems the exploit code for the mentioned vulnerability is already in the wild so it’s advised to update in a timely manner or deploy the following workaround if an upgrade is not possible:
on ^*:OPEN:?:*:if ($len($nick) > 298) halt
The above snippet should be added to ones mIRC’s remotes and shall then prevent the hole from being exploited.
On Sunday, 26th October the Anope project announces the release of release candidate 1 of their new stable branch, version 1.8 of their widely used IRC services package.
The announcement on their website also mentions that “Apart from updates to language files there are no changes since the last development release (1.7.24).”
However, all users of the last stable release, 1.6.5, should prepare to test the new version since they plan to stop supporting it when 1.8 becomes final.
A detailed changelog can be found here.
Thanks to Chaz & Viper for the tip!
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