phrozen77 | www.IRC-Junkie.org

Australian ISP’s Hunt Down Zombies

Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

The Australian government took an interesting path to battle the increasing problem of zombies on the Internet. Zombie is the term for PC’s which have been infected with software and then being abused by malicious people using them for spam, but also for example for DDoS attacks.

It is Senator Helen Coonan, minister for communications, information technology and the arts that came up with the plan for a 3 month trial. A total of 5 ISP’s have been selected for the trial.

Read the full post (266 words, estimated 1:04 mins reading time)

Tags: Botnets, Hack, IRC, Scum
Posted in Botnets/DDoS, Hack, IRC | No Comments »

Dronerunner Arrested in California

Saturday, November 5th, 2005

Worldwide the interest from the law enforcing organizations towards rolling up botnets is increasing. Only a month ago the Dutch police arrested three men who were controlling a net containing an estimated 1500000 machines.

Now Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California has been arrested last Tuesday by the FBI. Apparently it is the first time that a person has been arrested who is selling time on his botnet to outsiders.

Read the full post (175 words, estimated 42 secs reading time)

Tags: Botnets, DDoS, Hack, IRC, Scum
Posted in Botnets/DDoS, Hack, IRC | No Comments »

IRC Channel Driving Force Behind Revolutionary Software

Tuesday, November 1st, 2005

Napster and WinAmp are just two programs that are well known with the type of people that regurarly read IRC-Junkie, that is a known fact. What is lesser known is, that both project benefited greatly from an IRC channel on EFNet that functions as a gathering place for “professional software developers, talented college and highschool students, novice programmers seeking help and the usual charlatans and rogues that add character to the colourful world that is the Internet”, as the channels’ website explains.

An article about the channel, #Winprog, appeared today on Wired. “The IRC channel has played virtual incubator to a gamut of fledgling developers for more than a decade”, the article explains.

Read the full post (159 words, estimated 38 secs reading time)

Tags: EFNet, IRC
Posted in IRC, Networks, Software | No Comments »

Annual Celebration of Network Staff Stupidity at Chatspike

Thursday, October 20th, 2005

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.”

Read the full post (187 words, estimated 45 secs reading time)

Tags: Chatspike, IRC
Posted in IRC, Networks | No Comments »

IRC Might See Flux of Former Yahoo Users

Saturday, October 15th, 2005

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.