IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

IRC Defender arbitrary code execution exploit

phrozen77 — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 22:18:15 +0000

Yesterday, news broke that there is an arbitrary code execution exploit within the still popular IRC security service IRC Defender which is, according to the reporter, being actively exploited.

The flaw is said to be within the InspIRCd link module for which a patched version exists, but according to the original post to the IRC-Security mailinglist there are more flaws within the InspIRCd link module and also within the UnrealIRCd link module.

The original poster on the mailinglist suggests to get rid of IRC Defender immediately and to replace it with something else (have a look at Omega Security Services) and also to check for signs of recent intrusions which have taken place on or after 15th November. He also urges to look out for rogue entries in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and look for suspicious processes.

So far, at least three networks seem to have been exploited due to this flaw – the highest profile victim so far seems to be the hack of the AnonOps network which also seems to have been possible due to that flaw – contrary to the rumored Anope 0-day.

Original post on the IRC-Security mailinglist is here (needs registration).

Thanks to alyx for the tip etc!

The patched inspircd12.pm link module can be obtained from here.

IRC Defender arbitrary code execution exploit is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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UnrealIRCd 3.2.9 – New stable version after 2 years

phrozen77 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:46:45 +0000

UnrealIRCd, the IRCd that still dominates the usage statistics of all IRCds, has seen another stable release and is now at version 3.2.9.

After 2 release candidates and with 212 changes and bugfixes – almost the same amount as the last three stable releases combined – among which is a “substantial amount of new features” as Syzop writes in their announcement.

He thanks everyone that made this release possible but especially mentions binki who did a “considerable amount of work to make this release possible”.

And indeed, there is a large amount of changes – for example:

Extended Bans (new modes introduced, ban stacking behaviour)
Extended Invite Exceptions / Invex
New Channelmode +Z which works in conjunction with +z (SSL only) and is set once every joined user is on SSL which might not be the case during netsplits/-joins
Remote MOTD support
Remote includes caching so that an old version of a remote include is loaded in case the webserver containing the include is down
/rehash -global – rehashes all servers at once
STARTTLS – connect to a “regular” port SSL encrypted
IPv6 clones detection support, defaults to /64

A small excerpt of the bugs that have been fixed:

Low connection frequencies (connfreq) no longer pose a problem due to reworking the corresponding code
IPv6 related fixes
an obscure crash bug that only occured rarely on outgoing connects

Work on UnrealIRCd 3.3 already has begun and is, according to development plans, the replacement for the often retried and ultimately failed rewrite which was to be released as UnrealIRCd 4.

The release announcement can be found here and the full changelog for changes since UnrealIRCd 3.2.8.1 is here (you need to scroll all the way down).

UnrealIRCd 3.2.9 – New stable version after 2 years is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

Mibbit has been compromised

Kottizen — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 10:15:11 +0000

On August 14 a cracker group claiming to be “hackers” named HTP broke into Mibbit, the popular web chat client for IRC. According to their temporarily “rescue” blog the break-in only affected their IRC network, their primary blog and their Wiki. NickServ passwords in clear text were released later the same day by the HTP, as well as personal information regarding several staff members. Both their IRC O-line passwords as well as their NickServ passwords, home addresses and phone numbers were published to the public via a range of file hosting services, and Pastebin.

Something perhaps even more concerning is that the group has revealed not only channel logs, but logs of private messages. It appears like Mibbit has been logging what people have said in PM to each other over their network. According to official statements, this was only a test. Some people have heard that Mibbit has been logging all messages going through their systems. Mibbit has never logged anything, unless a user wants to enable logging. The leaked message logs were captured by a staff member, and not by Mibbit’s system, according to official statements. While this is fully legal, the level of ethicality has been questioned.

The web IRC client that can be used to connect to almost any other network, which is what made them famous, has not been affected. It is operating normally.

All NickServ passwords were stored in plain text, and that raised a concern for those who are interested and engaged in enforcing security. According to staff member pottsi password hashing was not done because that would “means sendpass and getpass would not work”. Another staff member, Joshua, claimed that password hashing was not done because it was too much work to convert all passwords. This has however proven to be incorrect, at least if they used a plain copy of Anope. In Anope’s module database, there is a module called enc_switchover. It’s fairly easy to migrate from one encryption method, or none, to another, using that module. In addition to that, the Anope module ns_resetpass will allow users to reset their passwords despite encryption taking place.

Many people, especially IRC administrators, are now questioning Mibbit’s reliability and some are considering to block access from the web service, just like one of the largest networks, freenode, did a couple of years ago. This is mainly due to the question whether they log messages there too, which would go against many networks’ policies.

The Mibbit team is now working very hard to bring all services back up again. At the time of writing, ChanServ and NickServ on their network is down and staff members are forced to use /samode if they need to get op. They advice everyone who had a NickServ account registered in April or earlier, this year, to change password.

Mibbit has been compromised is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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Hybrid releases 7.3.0

Kottizen — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 10:05:18 +0000

Earlier this week, Jon Lusky released a new version of ircd-hybrid. The version number has now reached 7.3.0. Among the changes you find a new Bulgarian translation, a fixed IPv6 implementation and channel modes O and S for opers-only respective SSL/TLS-only clients. Server administrators now get to choose whether they want to use SSLv3 or TLSv1 to secure connections. All spy-notice modules that previously covered reports for usage of STATS, TRACE, MOTD and ADMIN have been replaced by server-sided notices. The old LazyLinks concept has now been removed, as it was half broken. The WATCH command known from UnrealIRCd and Bahamut has been added. In addition to that, a few minor cleanups and bugs leading to crashes have been fixed.

Hybrid is used together with Ratbox (which is a fork) and CSIRCd on both EFnet and IRCsource. It has been forked many times and it’s known for its stability and quality of code.

By looking at the SVN repository it seems like the developer team behind Hybrid is working towards a 8.0 release, featuring better services support while still keeping simplicity.

Hybrid releases 7.3.0 is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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A Day on QuakeNet

phrozen77 — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 08:27:11 +0000

A nice visualization of a normal day on the “largest internet relay chat Network in the world” brings us meeb of QuakeNet:

He goes on to write that the video shows “one day of activity, 24 hours, midnight to midnight in UTC, on the QuakeNet IRC network summarised into a 12 minute data visualisation” and that “each dot represents a new user connecting to the network, there are some 400 new connections per minute on average in this visualisation”.

The data which the video was rendered of has been “collected strictly anonymously at a high level” by a network service that “already stores connection data in memory” meeb emphasizes.

Talking about the technical aspects of the video, meeb explains that the “final visualisation was produced using processing” – the total amount of data processed was 14GB that took about 8 hours on a fast PC according to meeb.

The resulting 1080p video was about 8GB in size for the 12 minute visualization and re-rendering that into a h264 video took “another 5-6 hours”.

For more information, read the original post here.

And yes, now i’m curious on how such a visualization would look like for other networks

A Day on QuakeNet is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

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