www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Santiago Garrido, 26 years-old, decided he would resort to DDoS after he was being banned from the Hispano IRC network. The DDoS generated caused such problems for Spanish ISP’s Wanadoo, ONO, Lleida Net and other ISP’s that 3 million users were left without connection. This equals to one third of all Spanish Internet users.

Yesterday Garrido (nicked “Ronnie” or “Mike25″) heard the sentence for his act; 2 years in jail, and a 1.4 million fine (roughly $1.6 million USD).

Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California, who was arrested in November of last year (we reported on his arrest here) has pleaded guilty to the charges of assembling a botnet, spamming, spreading of malicious software and profiting from these activities by selling services related to the botnet such as performing DDoS attacks.

Among the machines he infected and included in his botnet where computers at the Weapons Division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center and machines operated by the U.S. Department of Defense.

mIRC has seen issues with DCC exploits in the past. In December of last year another possible exploit/vulnerability has been announced on SecurityFocus IRC-Junkie initially decided not to post about since its significance was so minor. However, this issue seems to ruffle up feathers across several forums now.

The issue is described as a local mIRC buffer overflow initiated over DCC. “The code executed are with current user privileges,anyway this bug could be dangerous in universities, cyber coffees, schools and any location with restrictions. Adding/editing filters to locate the specified folder for the files”, the announcement on SecurityFocus reads.

Last weekend an account of a high level CService admin got compromised which caused some havoc on this top 5 IRC network. CService is Undernet’s channel service and is responsible for the channel service bot on the network, X.

For the account to be compromised the malicious person used social engineering and got the ISP of the admin in question to trust him and supply him with the password of the email account of the admin.

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.