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CIA funds monitoring of IRC (updated 2)

Thursday, November 25th, 2004

A university in New York is going to be working on a program to analyse IRC chat which is being funded by the CIA channeled through the National Science Foundation. This document outlines the project including the sum of money involved which is $157673 USD.

“The aim of this proposal is to develop new techniques for information gathering, analysis and modeling of chatroom communications”, the document explains. What the document did not lined out was that it was the CIA who was behind the funding.

Leland Jameson, NSF programme director said last Wednesday that the two year program will probably not see a new term.

Read the full post (442 words, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)

Tags: IRC, IRCu, Undernet
Posted in IRC, IRCd, Networks, Privacy | No Comments »

Password leak at QuakeNet (updated)

Monday, November 22nd, 2004

“As you may have noticed, earlier today the password for every Q account was changed. This was due to a suspected leak of some encrypted passwords from the QuakeNet website, shortly beforehand, causing the passwords to be changed as a precautionary measure whilst we investigated”, magpie reports at the QuakeNet website.

The site also recommends that if you use this same password for other services, on IRC or not, to change those passwords as well.

“We would like to assure users that we are working hard to ensure this cannot happen again, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused”, magpie finishes.

Read the full post (261 words, estimated 1:03 mins reading time)

Tags: Hack, IRC, Quakenet
Posted in Hack, IRC, Networks | No Comments »

EFnet tests OpenChanfix

Tuesday, November 16th, 2004

EFnet reports it will be testing the OpenChanfix variant of its Chanfix service. It is not a test to see if the opensource variant can replace the current Chanfix however.

Garion, one of the two OpenChanfix coders, said in a reaction to IRC-Junkie: “This is not a replacement, but a test to see whether OCF is really ready for production. Of course we have tested it extensively, but it is extremely difficult to create a good test environment which is a perfect copy of EFnet. That’s why we’ve decided to test it on EFnet itself.”

Read the full post (233 words, estimated 56 secs reading time)

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

BNC 2.8.9 remote buffer overflow

Friday, November 12th, 2004

The well known bouncer BNC contains a remote buffer overflow exploit.

“There is a buffer overflow vulnerability in getnickuserhost() function that is called when BNC is processing response from some IRC server. When BNC is connected to some IRC server, it will send ‘USER’ and ‘NICK’ command. Server response is at some point processed with getnickuserhost() function.” This post at Security Focus explains.

The overflow is present in version 2.8.9 and below. “Vulnerability can be exploited if attacker tricks user to connect to his fake IRC server that will exploit this vulnerability. If the attacker has access to BNC proxy server, this vulnerability can be used to gain shell access on machine here BNC proxy server is set.“, the Security Focus post explains.

Read the full post (132 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

Tags: Hack, IRC, Software
Posted in Hack, IRC, Software | No Comments »

QuakeNet restricts connections

Tuesday, November 9th, 2004

Due to extensive abuse and trojan connections from several ISP’s the connections from those ISP’s have been restricted to a maximum of two connections per host.

“Any users attempting to make more than two connections to the network will receive an error message of “Too many connections from your host”, as well as having their connection refused. We apologise to any legitimate users connecting from these hosts, but the situation has become unavoidable”, magpie announced on the QuakeNet website.

ISP affected include Wannadoo in the Netherlands and France, ono.com, bezeqint.net, proxad.net and the well known Spanish rima-tde.net.

Read the full post (110 words, estimated 26 secs reading time)

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

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