www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

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.

The Dutch police have arrested three men, ages 19, 22 and 27 year-old, who were running a network of compromised machines that was counting around 100000 total.

The 19 year-old is considered the prime suspect and the coder of the virus used, W32.Toxbot. The virus was first noticed at the start of this year.

An IRC channel was used to control the bots, and send them commands. They were used in DDoS attacks, and information was collected from online banking services (PayPal) and eBay accounts with the aid of a key-logger.

A second more serious security issue has been discovered which is also being fixed by the recently released Firefox 1.0.7.

The exploit, which is classified as ‘extremely critical’, exploits a security hole in the startup script of Firefox. By passing parameters in URL’s from external applications it is possible to perform commands when Firefox is configured to be the default browser.

The exploit can only be used on certain Linux and *nix systems.

“We have a work-around in xchat 2.4.5, but to really fix it you need to upgrade firefox and mozilla” XChat author Zed said to IRC-Junkie in a  reaction.

Richard “Krashed” Roby, 20 years old from Ohio pleaded guilty in federal court in Toledo to DDoS’ing online competitors of Jay Echouafni.

Jay Echouafni, a 38-year-old satellite TV salesman ordered Richard “Krashed” Roby to DDoS his competitors online. One of the other people who has been ordered to attack his competitors is Paul Ashley, who was in those days running the on IRC well known IRC shell company FOOnet. Echouafni offered Ashley 1000$ for the attacks.

EFNet’s global voting body has voted to switch its Chanfix reopping service to the opensource OpenChanfix.

“EFnet has traditionally been a network of multiple implementations”, OpenChanfix coder Garion explains to IRC-Junkie. ” We are running several compatible ircd versions, and that seems to do well. When it turned out that the maintainers of the current chanfix didn’t have the time to fix bugs and add features, Beige and I decided to write our own chanfix. Apparently the EFnet admins prefer this implementation over the current chanfix, because they voted to use OCF from now on.”