Version 2.8.7 released the 20th of last month has been superseded with 2.8.7a Zed announced on the XChat homepage.
This new version is mainly a bugfix release, as the changelog shows.
The XChat Windows release is shareware. Freeware versions are still being released from the otherwise still available opensource code. One such release is from Silverex but is an older release, 2.8.4.
As a recent post also indicated, botnets are considered one of the main Internet security threats. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have proposed a new piece of software that can detect botnets, named BotSniffer.
It is hard to detect botnets, as they make use of existing protocols such as IRC in ways that it makes it hard to distinguish them from ‘normal’ users.
The researchers explain: “Our approach is based on the observation that, because of the pre-programmed activities related to C&C (command & control, ed.), bots within the same botnet will likely demonstrate spatial-temporal correlation and similarity.”
Last month a new bug have been found in IRCu family IRCd’s which can be exploited leading to a crashing server.
In this post on Milw0rm the bug and exploit is explained. IRCu (<= 2.10.12.12) and many derivatives are affected.
IRC-Junkie asked Slug, who found the bug and described it on Milw0rm, how he found the bug. “Core dump from one of our servers,” Slug starts. “send_user_mode in s_user.c does not check that the argument after a +r mode is present, if it is not than the NULL sentinel may be missed, causing the function to iterate over the boundary of the array.”
Security Service Provider Arbor Networks studied the amount of junk traffic over the total sum of Internet traffic, and found some remarkable figures when it comes to IRC traffic.
Over the past 1,5 year the company analyzed data of 70 ISP’s. The findings show that on average 4% of all traffic is junk, such as spam and DDoS attacks topping 1,5TB of data, per second.
Of this 4%, on average 1300 DDoS attacks daily makes halve of the junk traffic. But on occasions, DDoS can make 5% of the total Internet traffic. Of the monitored DDoS attacks the majority consists of TCP SYN floods and ICMP floods targeted to IRC servers.
After being based on a modified IRCu for a long period of time, AustNet moves to an InspIRCd based IRCd. IRC-Junkie asks AustNet’s Praetorian about the how, why and what of this change.
“The previous IRCd that was in use, Austhex 7, had served AustNet for quite a long period,” Praetorian explains. “it was modified quite a bit, to accommodate things that were unique to AustNet, such as “helpers”, and virtual world, which when implemented, was quite unique for its time.”
Being so heavily modified it also offered serious challenges in the last days of its use. Sections of its code became so outdated modern compilers had problems compiling the code.
www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).
