[Asmo]

Gamer wins case against game company

Thursday, December 25 2003 by Asmo

A Chinese court in Beijing decided a Chinese online game company have to pay damages to a gamer who's account has been compromised on the companies server.

Over a period of two years 24-year-old Li Hongchen collected a nice sum of virtual money and weapons in the game, named "Red Moon". To accomplish this he also had to invest money in the real world, not to mention time and energy. "I exchanged the equipment with my labour, time, wisdom and money, and of course they are my belongings," he said to a Chinese newspaper.

Last February a cracker got access to the server over a exploit which has not been closed, and stole the virtual properties of Li Hongchen.

Now the court decided the company will have to return his virtual belongings to Li Hongchen. It is not known if the company also needs to pay real life money to Li Hongchen.

Everyone who has been actively engaged in maintaining and managing a IRC network knows how many compromised servers are being abused on IRC. It will be interesting to see if at some point a company decides to sue a Chinese company who's hacked server has been used to abuse or DDoS, as the Chinese court now showed it will be holding a company liable for poor security.

New Undernet newsletter

Monday, December 22 2003 by Asmo

Undernet released it's Christmas newsletter. Not surprisingly it contains a lot of articles related to Christmas.

Besides a few articles that describe how Christmas is celebrated in countries around the world, there are a few recipes that might come in handy for the coming day's and a few other assorted articles.

mIRC charity appeals ends

Sunday, December 21 2003 by Asmo

The period November 20th to December the 20th mIRC coder Khaled held a charity appeal for the International Red Cross Society.

All registrations done in this period would go to the International Red Cross Society for their measles campaign, goal to vaccinate as much African children as possible against this disease.

During the period a total of 2826 mIRC users registered, raising a total of $55,230.00.

IRC chat exposed cracker

Saturday, December 20 2003 by Asmo

Daniel Baas, 25, plead guilty Thursday to have hacked the database of the Acxiom Corporation. The company is well known for its massive databases with consumer and sales data.

Baas worked for a company that was contracted by Acxiom from October 2000 to last June. During this time he had legitimate access to a FTP server of Acxiom. During one of his sessions he found a unprotected file containing encrypted passwords.

Baas was able to crack some of the password, which gave him access to all the accounts of Acxiom customers. Those customers include credit-card companies, banks, phone companies, etc. who have databases hosted at their accounts at Acxiom.

Baas never abused the information, and his actions remained undetected until he performed a 2 minute favor for a friend on IRC. Using his nick "Epitaph", Baas was chatting with Jesse Tuttle, known online as "Hackah Jak."

Tuttle asked Baas if he "still had access" to a database from Beel hosted at Acxiom, and if so, if he could provide him the name of a FBI agent. Baas provided Tuttle with the agent's home address and telephone number.

Less then a month later, the Sheriff's Department computer crime detectives raided Tuttle's home to seize his computer for another offense, the intrusions into county websites. On the computer they found the log of the IRC chat he had with Tuttle, and found the evidence that he cracked the "mother of all consumer databases."

XChat news

Wednesday, December 17 2003 by Asmo

XChat's website reports that a kernel bug was the result of sending out corrupted files. "If you downloaded a corrupt tarball or Windows exe installer, you can retry now, it should be fixed," the site reports.

Additionally, the XChat 2.0.6 version has a serious exploit that let's remote users crash the client. A patch is available for those compiling from the source, and if you downloaded a ready to use version, updated binaries can be found here.

"When receiving a "passive" dcc request with an invalid ID number, the client will dereference NULL. As far as I know, this isn't exploitable other than crashing the client (it tries to write to address 0x00000008)," this email to the XChat-announce list explains.

The bug was introduced in version 2.0.6 by a patch accepted on the 18th of November. Version 2.0.5 and below do not contain this bug.

Underworld.* delinks from Galaxynet

Friday, December 12 2003 by Hardy

The server underworld.no.galaxynet.org delinked the server from Galaxynet earlier today.

The server have been massivly unstable the last months due to repeated attacks and network problems. The admin ( me.. ) decided it wasnt worth trying to stay linked when we had no idea if the problems ever would get fixed.

The server was linked for 1,5 years and was the only scandinavian server on the network.

Irssii 0.8.9 released

Friday, December 12 2003 by Asmo

Version 0.8.9 is released of the Irssii client is released.

"Most importantly fixes a remote crash with non-x86 architectures or with people running certain scripts (nicklist.pl, tab_stop.pl most importantly)," the website states.

Two new logfiles

Wednesday, December 10 2003 by Asmo

For your pleasure, we added two new logfiles who were submitted recently: Can you give me Oper here? and Phreakers!

BitchX changes

Wednesday, December 10 2003 by Asmo

After a few weeks of downtime due to a hardware failure, www.bitchx.org is back online.

"The fact is that we had a major hardware failure which caused us to the lose the primary machine in Denver, CO. Much as we appreciate everyone wanting to pitch in and provide mirrors and other support for the site, the fact is that we had to handle this in our own time since we don't get paid for a single thing around here", the website reads.

The forum is one of the last issues to be worked out, but is expected to be back up soon too.

Another thing in the works is a new BitchX version, appropriately named BitchX2. It will be eased on the code of the Epic4 client, with modifications to bring back popular functionality of BitchX.

DALnet DDoS attacks

Monday, December 8 2003 by Asmo

Users of the DALnet network might have noticed increased difficulty at the moment to connect to the network.

"DALnet is under attack now and then, which means that some users will experience problems finding a working client server to connect to", says DALnet admin Ahnberg in a reaction to IRCJunkie.

We asked Ahnberg if the reason is known of the current attacks. "In short, no, we have no real idea. And we don't have a red line to follow. Many different persons/groups attack us for any kind of reasons. Everything from "You suck" to "Give me that channel and I will stop".

Legacy NeoStats code causing problems with UnrealIRCD Beta 19

Monday, December 8 2003 by Asmo

A bit of "left over" code suddenly became use to those who liked to cause havoc on networks using the Unreal 3.2-beta19 IRCd server software.

Developer Fish explains the source of the problem in a reaction to IRCJunkie: "The older copy of Unreal 3.1 used to have a UMODE called Techadmin. It was removed a while ago, but as it didn't affect the operations of NeoStats, (and at that time, unreal had both Unreal 3.2 and Unreal 3.1 widely used) we never removed it." In the current Beta19 version however, the UnrealIRCD team re-introduced a usermode +T. The current usage being to block CTCP messages. So setting the mode on a network running NeoStats could "give some users almost full access to NeoStats", said Shmad from the NeoStats developer group.

This was already a known issue on the 27th of November, and a fix has been posted on the 29th of November. The NeoStats boards have a 2 line fix as well.

Besides this usermode +T there are also several other issues making running NeoStats on Beta19 a rather unstable experience.

Version 2.5.10 of NeoStats has been released yesterday "which will address this issue only (and not fix the other incompatibilities)" Fish said.

Bahamut 1.4.36 released

Sunday, December 7 2003 by Asmo

Bahamut 1.4.36 is released today. Some of the changes include a new usermode +l which hides the server and the hiding of split sources in quit messages.

You can find Bahamut 1.4.36 here.

Ice_Black wanted to be sure to be mentioned as the one who gave the tip, so here you go, thanks for the tip Ice_Black!

Cracker accused of underaged porn

Friday, December 5 2003 by Asmo

Jodi Jones, alias VeNoMouS, is being accused of posting improper photo's of under aged girls on his website www.ircwhores.co.nz. The website has since been replaced by a announcement saying the site will be moved to a server in the USA.

Jones motives for the site is for people to take revenge on ex-girlfriends. This article in the New Zealand Herald has some snippets from the site when it was still online. "nows [sic] your chance to get back at that ex-girlfriend (or boyfriend) that you have nude or semi-nude photos or movies of", the site reads.

The New Zealand Herald spoke to several woman who's photo's have been published on the website, and found out that some of them have not been given Jones rights to publish their photo on the site. This is against the law in New Zealand. One of the girls said to the newspaper she was "very young at the time, only 15-16, and Jodi was 22, so I did what he wanted".

In a IRC log on the website the girl claims to have lied to the newspaper about her age at that time.

The website has been hosted on the companies network where Jones is working for, Network Service Providers in Auckland which is a internet provider. Director Brent Larsen denied knowing the website was hosted by his company, and if it was, that it is removed now. Jones declared his employer did not know the site was being hosted by his company, and says it was only there during development.

The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs contacted Jones after having received a complaint, and currently started a investigation.

Jodi Jones has been convicted to perform 100 hours community service, and pay $3000 NZD in February this year after he has been found guilty cracking the Web Internet ISP with a SSH exploit. In March this year the website Stuff.co.nz website linked Jones to Milw0rm, a group known to have exploited several companies and institutions, one being a Atomic Research Centre in Bhabha, India. Both of these articles can be found back in IRCJunkie's news archive. Jones is also known for causing problems on the Undernet IRC network.

#Anti-Cancer live event

Thursday, December 4 2003 by Asmo

#Anti-Cancer is a support channel on Undernet for those who have had contact with this disease and likes to share their feelings with others. The channel is about to have its first live-event on the 6th of December 2003 at 17:00 GMT.

Guest of the evening will be Dr. Savvas Chrisanthou. Dr. Chrisanthou is a Cytologist. The organiser of the event HvyMetal explains: "Cytologists are the people who examin cells under the microscope to detect a variety of diseases including various types of cancers."

QuakeNet's Q back up

Wednesday, December 3 2003 by Asmo

QuakeNet has re-enabled the requesting of the Q bot. The Q bot is the channel service of the QuakeNet network.

"To request Q, you must have an average of at least 100 users on your channel, measured over a 14 day period. There is also a web-based request system due to be launched shortly", the website states.

Two updates after the initial posting explain this initial very high requirement was "to allow the system to be tested. The requirement will be reduced over the coming weeks." The requirement has already been lowered to 70 users over a 2 week period.
_________________
Asmo

webmaster www.IRC-Junkie.org