142-489: Freenode , stylized as freenode and formerly known as Open Projects Network , is an IRC network which was previously used to discuss peer-directed projects. Their servers are accessible from the hostname chat.freenode.net , which load balances connections by using round-robin DNS . On 19 May 2021, Freenode underwent what some staff described as a "hostile takeover" and at least 14 volunteer staff members resigned. Following
284-465: A Content-Length field to specify the size of the message body to follow. However, the attacker then proceeds to send the actual message body at an extremely slow rate (e.g. 1 byte/110 seconds). Due to the entire message being correct and complete, the target server will attempt to obey the Content-Length field in the header, and wait for the entire body of the message to be transmitted, which can take
426-497: A K-line banning most users of the network. The spambot attack continued in the following year, involving even more networks, and was called "Freenodegate". Attackers also created sites attacking the administrators of Freenode. After OPN co-founder Rob Levin died in September 2006, Christel Dahlskjaer, a PDPC board member, incorporated Peer-Directed Projects Center Limited in 2008 in the UK as
568-443: A terabit per second . Some common examples of DDoS attacks are UDP flooding , SYN flooding and DNS amplification . A yo-yo attack is a specific type of DoS/DDoS aimed at cloud-hosted applications which use autoscaling . The attacker generates a flood of traffic until a cloud-hosted service scales outwards to handle the increase of traffic, then halts the attack, leaving the victim with over-provisioned resources. When
710-487: A "hostile takeover" attempt by Lee. In February 2021, Dahlskjaer added the logo of Shells, a company and service which Lee co-founded, to the Freenode website. Following criticism from staff, Dahlskjaer resigned from leadership of Freenode shortly after. Following Dahlskjaer's resignation, Freenode staff elected Tom Wesley (tomaw) as head of staff and made a blog post explaining the leadership changes. Staff allege that Lee removed
852-414: A "hostile takeover". In a statement released by Lee, he said that he is entitled to access Freenode's servers as he is the owner of Freenode Limited. Vice wrote that it was unclear what would happen to organizations that rely on Freenode. Hackaday reported that Vim and RepRap had migrated from Freenode to Libera Chat , a new IRC network announced by some of the former staff members shortly after
994-474: A DDoS, attacks may involve forging of IP sender addresses ( IP address spoofing ) further complicating identifying and defeating the attack. These attacker advantages cause challenges for defense mechanisms. For example, merely purchasing more incoming bandwidth than the current volume of the attack might not help, because the attacker might be able to simply add more attack machines. The scale of DDoS attacks has continued to rise over recent years, by 2016 exceeding
1136-601: A DNS name lookup request to one or more public DNS servers, spoofing the source IP address of the targeted victim. The attacker tries to request as much information as possible, thus amplifying the DNS response that is sent to the targeted victim. Since the size of the request is significantly smaller than the response, the attacker is easily able to increase the amount of traffic directed at the target. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) can also be exploited as reflectors in an amplification attack. An example of an amplified DDoS attack through
1278-628: A HTTP pipelining DDoS attack on Sept. 5. 2021 that originated from unpatched Mikrotik networking gear. In the first half of 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine significantly shaped the cyberthreat landscape, with an increase in cyberattacks attributed to both state-sponsored actors and global hacktivist activities. The most notable event was a DDoS attack in February, the largest Ukraine has encountered, disrupting government and financial sector services. This wave of cyber aggression extended to Western allies like
1420-537: A Latin letter "+o"/"o"). On most networks, an operator can: There are also users who maintain elevated rights on their local server, or the entire network; these are called IRC operators, sometimes shortened to IRCops or Opers (not to be confused with channel operators). As the implementation of the IRCd varies, so do the privileges of the IRC operator on the given IRCd. RFC 1459 claims that IRC operators are "a necessary evil" to keep
1562-547: A bicycle at night in Houston, Texas . After the accident, Levin was hospitalized with head injuries. He died on 16 September, at the age of 50. Internet Relay Chat IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging . IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels , but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer , including file sharing . Internet Relay Chat
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#17330858493021704-732: A clean state of the network, and as such they need to be able to disconnect and reconnect servers. Additionally, to prevent malicious users or even harmful automated programs from entering IRC, IRC operators are usually allowed to disconnect clients and completely ban IP addresses or complete subnets. Networks that carry services (NickServ et al.) usually allow their IRC operators also to handle basic "ownership" matters. Further privileged rights may include overriding channel bans (being able to join channels they would not be allowed to join, if they were not opered), being able to op themselves on channels where they would not be able without being opered, being auto-opped on channels always and so forth. A hostmask
1846-416: A common solution is to use IRCv3 "multi-prefix" extension. Many daemons and networks have added extra modes or modified the behavior of modes in the above list. A channel operator is a client on an IRC channel that manages the channel. IRC channel operators can be easily seen by the symbol or icon next to their name (varies by client implementation, commonly a "@" symbol prefix, a green circle, or
1988-409: A denial-of-service attack. Exposure of degradation-of-service attacks is complicated further by the matter of discerning whether the server is really being attacked or is experiencing higher than normal legitimate traffic loads. If an attacker mounts an attack from a single host, it would be classified as a DoS attack. Any attack against availability would be classed as a denial-of-service attack. On
2130-509: A diversion to evade defensive DDoS countermeasures but all the while eventually concentrating the main thrust of the attack onto a single victim. In this scenario, attackers with continuous access to several very powerful network resources are capable of sustaining a prolonged campaign generating enormous levels of unamplified DDoS traffic. APDoS attacks are characterized by: Some vendors provide so-called booter or stresser services, which have simple web-based front ends, and accept payment over
2272-423: A hacking tool to send these kinds of requests to attack a NSFOCUS firewall named Collapsar, and thus the hacking tool was known as Challenge Collapsar, or CC for short. Consequently, this type of attack got the name CC attack . A smurf attack relies on misconfigured network devices that allow packets to be sent to all computer hosts on a particular network via the broadcast address of the network, rather than
2414-540: A loop of paper at the sender. It takes more router resources to drop a packet with a TTL value of 1 or less than it does to forward a packet with a higher TTL value. When a packet is dropped due to TTL expiry, the router CPU must generate and send an ICMP time exceeded response. Generating many of these responses can overload the router's CPU. A UPnP attack uses an existing vulnerability in Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol to get past network security and flood
2556-459: A low-level attack and a warning that a larger attack will be carried out if a ransom is not paid in bitcoin . Security experts recommend targeted websites to not pay the ransom. The attackers tend to get into an extended extortion scheme once they recognize that the target is ready to pay. First discovered in 2009, the HTTP slow POST attack sends a complete, legitimate HTTP POST header , which includes
2698-420: A network of IRC servers is a tree . Messages are routed along only necessary branches of the tree but network state is sent to every server and there is generally a high degree of implicit trust between servers. However, this architecture has a number of problems. A misbehaving or malicious server can cause major damage to the network and any changes in structure, whether intentional or a result of conditions on
2840-496: A new person to oversee Freenode infrastructure and published a statement accusing staff members of ousting Dahlskjaer. Freenode staff resigned en masse, and some published statements outlining their view of what happened. Some accused Lee of applying legal pressure to Wesley. Lee said this was not true, and said that he had provided Freenode with millions of dollars, and that the staffers ousted Dahlskjaer as head of staff. Lee also accused Wesley of harassing Dahlskjaer and of attempting
2982-450: A piece of malware that targeted IoT devices, used PDoS attacks to disable its targets. PhlashDance is a tool created by Rich Smith (an employee of Hewlett-Packard 's Systems Security Lab) used to detect and demonstrate PDoS vulnerabilities at the 2008 EUSecWest Applied Security Conference in London, UK. A distributed denial-of-service attack may involve sending forged requests of some type to
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#17330858493023124-569: A private company limited by guarantee without share capital, stating "general non-profit making enterprise" as its object. PDPC Ltd. said it was the successor of the US-based PDPC. PDPC Ltd. reported £3,060 in net assets for 2009, reported Dahlskjaer as officer in 2010 and was dissolved in 2013. In 2017, Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated Freenode Limited and transferred ownership of it to technology entrepreneur Andrew Lee in 2017. According to staff, they were not informed of
3266-459: A record-breaking packet DDoS at 3.15 billion packets per second, which targeted an undisclosed number of unofficial Minecraft game servers . In October 2024, the Internet Archive faced two severe DDoS attacks that brought the site completely offline, immediately following a previous attack that leaked records of over 31 million of the site's users. The hacktivist group SN_Blackmeta claimed
3408-412: A server or the entire network), IRCop only communications: GlobOps, +H mode showing that an IRCop is a "helpop" etc. Much of DALnet's new functions were written in early 1995 by Brian "Morpher" Smith and allow users to own nicknames, control channels, send memos, and more. In July 1996, after months of flame wars and discussions on the mailing list, there was yet another split due to disagreement in how
3550-500: A server use '&'. Other less common channel types include '+' channels—'modeless' channels without operators —and '!' channels, a form of timestamped channel on normally non-timestamped networks. Users and channels may have modes that are represented by individual case-sensitive letters and are set using the MODE command. User modes and channel modes are separate and can use the same letter to mean different things (e.g. user mode "i"
3692-430: A server with millions of requests to slow its performance, overwhelming a server with a substantial amount of invalid data, to submitting requests with an illegitimate IP address . In a distributed denial-of-service attack ( DDoS attack ), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. More sophisticated strategies are required to mitigate this type of attack; simply attempting to block
3834-479: A single machine and are harder to disable, and the behavior of each attack machine can be stealthier, making the attack harder to track and shut down. Since the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from different sources, it may be impossible to stop the attack simply by using ingress filtering . It also makes it difficult to distinguish legitimate user traffic from attack traffic when spread across multiple points of origin. As an alternative or augmentation of
3976-510: A single source is insufficient as there are multiple sources. A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade and losing the business money. Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks or credit card payment gateways . Revenge and blackmail , as well as hacktivism , can motivate these attacks. Panix ,
4118-416: A specific machine. The attacker will send large numbers of IP packets with the source address faked to appear to be the address of the victim. Most devices on a network will, by default, respond to this by sending a reply to the source IP address. If the number of machines on the network that receive and respond to these packets is very large, the victim's computer will be flooded with traffic. This overloads
4260-430: A system crash on a vulnerable system. The BlackNurse attack is an example of an attack taking advantage of the required Destination Port Unreachable ICMP packets. A nuke is an old-fashioned denial-of-service attack against computer networks consisting of fragmented or otherwise invalid ICMP packets sent to the target, achieved by using a modified ping utility to repeatedly send this corrupt data , thus slowing down
4402-471: A target's network and servers. The attack is based on a DNS amplification technique, but the attack mechanism is a UPnP router that forwards requests from one outer source to another. The UPnP router returns the data on an unexpected UDP port from a bogus IP address, making it harder to take simple action to shut down the traffic flood. According to the Imperva researchers, the most effective way to stop this attack
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4544-405: A thousand projects had left Freenode. Freenode began as a four-person Linux support channel called #LinPeople on EFnet , another IRC network. By 1995, after moving to Undernet , and then to DALnet , it moved from being just a channel to its own network, irc.linpeople.org. In early 1998, it changed to Open Projects Net (OPN) with about 200 users and under 20 channels. OPN soon grew to become
4686-432: A tool to test the security of servers against this type of attack. A Challenge Collapsar (CC) attack is an attack where standard HTTP requests are sent to a targeted web server frequently. The Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in the requests require complicated time-consuming algorithms or database operations which may exhaust the resources of the targeted web server. In 2004, a Chinese hacker nicknamed KiKi invented
4828-617: A user is affiliated with a group or project. DDoS In computing , a denial-of-service attack ( DoS attack ) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network . Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled. The range of attacks varies widely, spanning from inundating
4970-438: A very large number of computers that will reply to the requests. Using Internet Protocol address spoofing , the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to (and flood) the target. This reflected attack form is sometimes called a distributed reflective denial-of-service ( DRDoS ) attack. ICMP echo request attacks ( Smurf attacks ) can be considered one form of reflected attack, as
5112-400: A very long time. The attacker establishes hundreds or even thousands of such connections until all resources for incoming connections on the victim server are exhausted, making any further connections impossible until all data has been sent. It is notable that unlike many other DDoS or DDoS attacks, which try to subdue the server by overloading its network or CPU, an HTTP slow POST attack targets
5254-594: A wide range of source IP addresses, giving the appearance of a distributed DoS. These flood attacks do not require completion of the TCP three-way handshake and attempt to exhaust the destination SYN queue or the server bandwidth. Because the source IP addresses can be trivially spoofed, an attack could come from a limited set of sources, or may even originate from a single host. Stack enhancements such as SYN cookies may be effective mitigation against SYN queue flooding but do not address bandwidth exhaustion. In 2022, TCP attacks were
5396-485: A wide variety of DDoS tools are available today, including paid and free versions, with different features available. There is an underground market for these in hacker-related forums and IRC channels. Application-layer attacks employ DoS-causing exploits and can cause server-running software to fill the disk space or consume all available memory or CPU time . Attacks may use specific packet types or connection requests to saturate finite resources by, for example, occupying
5538-543: Is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardizes the internal functions of a communication system by partitioning it into abstraction layers . The model is a product of the Open Systems Interconnection project at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The model groups similar communication functions into one of seven logical layers. A layer serves the layer above it and
5680-503: Is a denial-of-service attack on the Transmission Control Protocol where the attacker employs man-in-the-middle techniques . It exploits a weakness in TCP's re-transmission timeout mechanism, using short synchronized bursts of traffic to disrupt TCP connections on the same link. A slow read attack sends legitimate application layer requests, but reads responses very slowly, keeping connections open longer hoping to exhaust
5822-1047: Is a form of DDoS attack where attackers target application-layer processes. The attack over-exercises specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. This application-layer attack is different from an entire network attack, and is often used against financial institutions to distract IT and security personnel from security breaches. In 2013, application-layer DDoS attacks represented 20% of all DDoS attacks. According to research by Akamai Technologies , there have been "51 percent more application layer attacks" from Q4 2013 to Q4 2014 and "16 percent more" from Q3 2014 to Q4 2014. In November 2017; Junade Ali, an engineer at Cloudflare noted that whilst network-level attacks continue to be of high capacity, they were occurring less frequently. Ali further noted that although network-level attacks were becoming less frequent, data from Cloudflare demonstrated that application-layer attacks were still showing no sign of slowing down. The OSI model (ISO/IEC 7498-1)
Freenode - Misplaced Pages Continue
5964-419: Is a unique identifier of an IRC client connected to an IRC server . IRC servers , services , and other clients, including bots , can use it to identify a specific IRC session. The format of a hostmask is nick!user@host . The hostmask looks similar to, but should not be confused with an e-mail address . The nick part is the nickname chosen by the user and may be changed while connected. The user part
6106-406: Is delivered in a fashion similar to multicast , meaning each message travels a network link exactly once. This is a strength in comparison to non-multicasting protocols such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) . An IRC daemon can be used on a local area network (LAN). IRC can thus be used to facilitate communication between people within
6248-508: Is for companies to lock down UPnP routers. In 2014, it was discovered that Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) was being used in DDoS attacks known as an SSDP reflection attac k with amplification . Many devices, including some residential routers, have a vulnerability in the UPnP software that allows an attacker to get replies from UDP port 1900 to a destination address of their choice. With
6390-402: Is handled like a connection request, causing the server to spawn a half-open connection , send back a TCP/SYN-ACK packet, and wait for a packet in response from the sender address. However, because the sender's address is forged, the response never comes. These half-open connections exhaust the available connections the server can make, keeping it from responding to legitimate requests until after
6532-541: Is implemented as an application layer protocol to facilitate communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client–server networking model . Users connect, using a client—which may be a web app , a standalone desktop program , or embedded into part of a larger program—to an IRC server, which may be part of a larger IRC network. Examples of programs used to connect include Mibbit , IRCCloud , KiwiIRC , and mIRC . IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60 percent of its users. In April 2011,
6674-422: Is invisible mode while channel mode "i" is invite only. ) Modes are usually set and unset using the mode command that takes a target (user or channel), a set of modes to set (+) or unset (-) and any parameters the modes need. Some channel modes take parameters and other channel modes apply to a user on a channel or add or remove a mask (e.g. a ban mask) from a list associated with the channel rather than applying to
6816-652: Is known as the organization which ran the Freenode IRC network, where many prominent open source projects hosted their official IRC channels. The PDPC was incorporated in England and Wales . PDPC was created to run the Freenode network and to establish a variety of programs relating to peer-directed project communities. According to its charter, the PDPC exists "to help peer-directed project communities flourish", mostly based around free and open-source software projects, and encouraging
6958-480: Is no botnet and the attacker does not have to communicate with the clients it subverts. Instead, the attacker acts as a puppet master , instructing clients of large peer-to-peer file sharing hubs to disconnect from their peer-to-peer network and to connect to the victim's website instead. Permanent denial-of-service (PDoS), also known loosely as phlashing, is an attack that damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. Unlike
7100-470: Is served by the layer below it. For example, a layer that provides error-free communications across a network provides the communications path needed by applications above it, while it calls the next lower layer to send and receive packets that traverse that path. In the OSI model, the definition of its application layer is narrower in scope than is often implemented. The OSI model defines the application layer as being
7242-474: Is the username reported by ident on the client. If ident is not available on the client, the username specified when the client connected is used after being prefixed with a tilde . The host part is the hostname the client is connecting from. If the IP address of the client cannot be resolved to a valid hostname by the server, it is used instead of the hostname. Because of the privacy implications of exposing
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#17330858493027384-457: Is to brick the device, rendering it unusable for its original purpose until it can be repaired or replaced. The PDoS is a pure hardware-targeted attack that can be much faster and requires fewer resources than using a botnet in a DDoS attack. Because of these features, and the potential and high probability of security exploits on network-enabled embedded devices, this technique has come to the attention of numerous hacking communities. BrickerBot ,
7526-488: Is unlikely to meet the $ 30,000 Bitcoin ransom. In August 2023, the group of hacktivists NoName057 targeted several Italian financial institutions, through the execution of slow DoS attacks . On 14 January 2024, they executed a DDoS attack on Swiss federal websites, prompted by President Zelensky 's attendance at the Davos World Economic Forum . Switzerland's National Cyber Security Centre quickly mitigated
7668-402: The 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal , telemarketers were used to flood political opponents with spurious calls to jam phone banks on election day. Widespread publication of a number can also flood it with enough calls to render it unusable, as happened by accident in 1981 with multiple +1- area code -867-5309 subscribers inundated by hundreds of calls daily in response to
7810-456: The Las Vegas Strip for over an hour. The release of sample code during the event led to the online attack of Sprint , EarthLink , E-Trade , and other major corporations in the year to follow. The largest DDoS attack to date happened in September 2017, when Google Cloud experienced an attack with a peak volume of 2.54 Tb/s , revealed by Google on October 17, 2020. The record holder
7952-756: The Linux Fund in 2007. On 24 June 2006, a user with the nickname ratbert gained administrative privileges of Freenode administrator Rob Levin ( lilo ) and took control of the network. It is likely that approximately 25 user passwords were stolen as a result. This user proceeded to K-line many Freenode staff members, and most Freenode servers subsequently went down for several hours. Around 30 January 2010, an internet troll organization, Gay Nigger Association of America , took an established exploit in HTML form and HTTP POST implementation (previously used in attacks on email protocols, e.g. POP3 and SMTP ) and applied it to
8094-446: The bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. A DDoS attack uses more than one unique IP address or machines, often from thousands of hosts infected with malware . A distributed denial of service attack typically involves more than around 3–5 nodes on different networks; fewer nodes may qualify as a DoS attack but is not a DDoS attack. Multiple attack machines can generate more attack traffic than
8236-554: The logical resources of the victim, which means the victim would still have enough network bandwidth and processing power to operate. Combined with the fact that the Apache HTTP Server will, by default, accept requests up to 2GB in size, this attack can be particularly powerful. HTTP slow POST attacks are difficult to differentiate from legitimate connections and are therefore able to bypass some protection systems. OWASP , an open source web application security project, released
8378-797: The DDoS attack as retribution for American involvement in the Israel–Hamas war , despite the Internet Archive being unaffiliated with the United States government; however, their link with the preceding data leak remains unclear. Denial-of-service attacks are characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate use of a service. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services. The most serious attacks are distributed. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood
8520-804: The EFnet ircd version 2.8.10). It was meant to be just a test network to develop bots on but it quickly grew to a network "for friends and their friends". In Europe and Canada a separate new network was being worked on and in December the French servers connected to the Canadian ones, and by the end of the month, the French and Canadian network was connected to the US one, forming the network that later came to be called "The Undernet ". The "undernetters" wanted to take ircd further in an attempt to make it use less bandwidth and to try to sort out
8662-591: The Finnish network. They had obtained the program from one of Oikarinen's friends, Vijay Subramaniam—the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network— FUNET —and then connected to Nordunet , the Scandinavian branch of the Internet. In November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide. In August 1990,
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#17330858493028804-532: The IP address or hostname of a client, some IRC daemons also provide privacy features, such as InspIRCd or UnrealIRCd's "+x" mode. This hashes a client IP address or masks part of a client's hostname, making it unreadable to users other than IRCops . Users may also have the option of requesting a "virtual host" (or "vhost"), to be displayed in the hostmask to allow further anonymity. Some IRC networks, such as Libera Chat or Freenode , use these as "cloaks" to indicate that
8946-471: The IRC command LIST , which lists all currently available channels that do not have the modes +s or +p set, on that particular network. Users can join a channel using the JOIN command, in most clients available as /join #channelname . Messages sent to the joined channels are then relayed to all other users. Channels that are available across an entire IRC network are prefixed with a '#', while those local to
9088-417: The IRC network. Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. There are many client implementations, such as mIRC , HexChat and irssi , and server implementations, e.g. the original IRCd . Most IRC servers do not require users to register an account but a nickname is required before being connected. IRC was originally a plain text protocol (although later extended), which on request
9230-401: The IRC protocol have been published, there is no official specification, as the protocol remains dynamic. Virtually no clients and very few servers rely strictly on the above RFCs as a reference. Microsoft made an extension for IRC in 1998 via the proprietary IRCX . They later stopped distributing software supporting IRCX, instead developing the proprietary MSNP . The standard structure of
9372-475: The IRC protocol to create a novel type of attack on Freenode, which had never been seen before in the wild. The organization created a piece of JavaScript that caused users of Mozilla -based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey to silently connect to Freenode and flood it. This exploit used an ability of Firefox to submit web forms to a port other than 80 (the default HTTP port). Whilst Firefox developers had blocked most ports some time ago, port 6667,
9514-463: The Internet. New server software has added a multitude of new features. As of 2016 , a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features such as instant notifications, better history support and improved security. As of 2019 , no major IRC networks have fully adopted the proposed standard. As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating, of which
9656-466: The NTP is through a command called monlist, which sends the details of the last 600 hosts that have requested the time from the NTP server back to the requester. A small request to this time server can be sent using a spoofed source IP address of some victim, which results in a response 556.9 times the size of the request being sent to the victim. This becomes amplified when using botnets that all send requests with
9798-459: The UK, the US, and Germany. Particularly, the UK's financial sector saw an increase in DDoS attacks from nation-state actors and hacktivists, aimed at undermining Ukraine's allies. In February 2023, Cloudflare faced a 71 million/requests per second attack which Cloudflare claims was the largest HTTP DDoS attack at the time. HTTP DDoS attacks are measured by HTTP requests per second instead of packets per second or bits per second. On July 10, 2023,
9940-500: The US side. Most (not all) of the IRCnet servers were in Europe, while most of the EFnet servers were in the US. This event is also known as "The Great Split" in many IRC societies. EFnet has since (as of August 1998) grown and passed the number of users it had then. In the (northern) autumn of the year 2000, EFnet had some 50,000 users and IRCnet 70,000. IRC has changed much over its life on
10082-712: The affected computer until it comes to a complete stop. A specific example of a nuke attack that gained some prominence is the WinNuke , which exploited the vulnerability in the NetBIOS handler in Windows 95 . A string of out-of-band data was sent to TCP port 139 of the victim's machine, causing it to lock up and display a Blue Screen of Death . Attackers have found a way to exploit a number of bugs in peer-to-peer servers to initiate DDoS attacks. The most aggressive of these peer-to-peer-DDoS attacks exploits DC++ . With peer-to-peer there
10224-518: The application layer can disrupt services such as the retrieval of information or search functions on a website. An advanced persistent DoS (APDoS) is associated with an advanced persistent threat and requires specialized DDoS mitigation . These attacks can persist for weeks; the longest continuous period noted so far lasted 38 days. This attack involved approximately 50+ petabits (50,000+ terabits) of malicious traffic. Attackers in this scenario may tactically switch between several targets to create
10366-423: The attack ends. A teardrop attack involves sending mangled IP fragments with overlapping, oversized payloads to the target machine. This can crash various operating systems because of a bug in their TCP/IP fragmentation re-assembly code. Windows 3.1x , Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, as well as versions of Linux prior to versions 2.0.32 and 2.1.63 are vulnerable to this attack. One of
10508-600: The attack had rendered the network "unusable [...] for days" due to what he perceived as incompetence among Freenode's staff at the time. He stated that the organization had also tried the same attack on other networks but had been shut down far more rapidly. On 2 February 2014, Freenode suffered a DDoS attack (confirmed by @freenodestaff on Twitter) which caused a partial outage. On 22 February 2014, Freenode suffered another DDoS attack which caused partial outage, followed by several botnets which attempted to attack #freenode but were redirected to #freenode-unreg . After
10650-531: The attack, ensuring core federal services remained secure, despite temporary accessibility issues on some websites. In October 2023, exploitation of a new vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol resulted in the record for largest HTTP DDoS attack being broken twice, once with a 201 million requests per second attack observed by Cloudflare, and again with a 398 million requests per second attack observed by Google . In August 2024, Global Secure Layer observed and reported on
10792-411: The attacker disrupts control packets using a hidden Markov model . A setting in which Markov-model based attacks are prevalent is online gaming as the disruption of the control packet undermines game play and system functionality. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has identified symptoms of a denial-of-service attack to include: In cases such as MyDoom and Slowloris ,
10934-440: The attacker sends traffic consisting of complicated requests to the system. Essentially, a sophisticated DDoS attack is lower in cost due to its use of less traffic, is smaller in size making it more difficult to identify, and it has the ability to hurt systems which are protected by flow control mechanisms. A SYN flood occurs when a host sends a flood of TCP/SYN packets, often with a forged sender address. Each of these packets
11076-474: The attacker uses a client program to connect to handlers, which are compromised systems that issue commands to the zombie agents, which in turn facilitate the DDoS attack. Agents are compromised via the handlers by the attacker. Each handler can control up to a thousand agents. In some cases a machine may become part of a DDoS attack with the owner's consent, for example, in Operation Payback , organized by
11218-452: The attacker using automated routines to exploit vulnerabilities in programs that accept remote connections running on the targeted remote hosts. Each handler can control up to a thousand agents. In other cases a machine may become part of a DDoS attack with the owner's consent, for example, in Operation Payback organized by the group Anonymous . The Low Orbit Ion Cannon has typically been used in this way. Along with High Orbit Ion Cannon
11360-601: The attacks, several servers remained nullrouted by their providers and, for a short time period, only a single server in rotation was accepting connections. On 13 September 2014, a DDoS attack occurred which caused the network to split for several hours, followed by several botnet attacks in the #freenode channel and against Freenode's services. Freenode's infrastructure team noticed a vulnerability on one of their IRC servers and evidence of compromise by an unknown third party. Freenode recommended that all users change their NickServ password for safety reasons, and temporarily took
11502-592: The availability of well known websites to legitimate users. More sophisticated attackers use DDoS tools for the purposes of extortion – including against their business rivals. It has been reported that there are new attacks from internet of things (IoT) devices that have been involved in denial of service attacks. In one noted attack that was made peaked at around 20,000 requests per second which came from around 900 CCTV cameras. UK's GCHQ has tools built for DDoS, named PREDATORS FACE and ROLLING THUNDER. Simple attacks such as SYN floods may appear with
11644-431: The blog post shortly after. Hackaday reported that an associate of Andrew Lee, Shane Allen, was recorded making statements that he would be promoted to staff member, and was also recorded recruiting others for staff. Hackaday also reported that Allen offered Alpine Linux security team chair, Ariadne Conill, donations to her project if she joined their team and supported Lee's claim to Freenode. On 11 May, Lee appointed
11786-441: The board was David Levin, Rob's brother. In March 2013, the PDPC was dissolved. The decision to dissolve was made in part due to the donation levels and costs associated with maintaining its status as a charitable organization in the UK. Robert Levin, also known as lilo , was the founder of the Freenode IRC network and Executive Director of the PDPC charity that helped fund Freenode. From 1994 onwards, Levin worked to encourage
11928-444: The channel as a whole. Modes that apply to users on a channel have an associated symbol that is used to represent the mode in names replies (sent to clients on first joining a channel and use of the names command) and in many clients also used to represent it in the client's displayed list of users in a channel or to display an own indicator for a user's modes. In order to correctly parse incoming mode messages and track channel state
12070-526: The channel chaos ( netsplits and takeovers ) that EFnet started to suffer from. For the latter purpose, the Undernet implemented timestamps, new routing and offered the CService—a program that allowed users to register channels and then attempted to protect them from troublemakers. The first server list presented, from 15 February 1993, includes servers from the U.S., Canada, France, Croatia and Japan. On 15 August,
12212-418: The client does not recognize) passed directly to the server, possibly with some modification. Due to the nature of the protocol, automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing. The basic means of communicating to a group of users in an established IRC session is through a channel . Channels on a network can be displayed using
12354-455: The client must know which mode is of which type and for the modes that apply to a user on a channel which symbol goes with which letter. In early implementations of IRC this had to be hard-coded in the client but there is now a de facto standard extension to the protocol called ISUPPORT that sends this information to the client at connect time using numeric 005. There is a small design fault in IRC regarding modes that apply to users on channels:
12496-541: The client, preventing outside access, as well as flooding the client with the sent packets. A LAND attack is of this type. Pulsing zombies are compromised computers that are directed to launch intermittent and short-lived floodings of victim websites with the intent of merely slowing it rather than crashing it. This type of attack, referred to as degradation-of-service , can be more difficult to detect and can disrupt and hamper connection to websites for prolonged periods of time, potentially causing more overall disruption than
12638-489: The community nature of IRC there are a large number of other networks for users to choose from. Historically the "Big Four" were: IRC reached 6 million simultaneous users in 2001 and 10 million users in 2004–2005, dropping to around 350k in 2021. The top 100 IRC networks have around 230k users connected at peak hours. Timeline of major networks: IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP and, optionally, TLS . An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand
12780-417: The compromised server offline until the vulnerability was fixed. On 14 October 2014, NCC Group released a deep technical analysis of the rootkit used in the attack. In 2015, Freenode was bridged to Matrix via matrix.org. On 17 August 2017, Freenode suffered from a "fairly extensive spambot attack ... containing child pornography images." In the midst of combating the attack, the operators accidentally set
12922-548: The contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations as the company only managed the Freenode #live conferences and nothing else; other volunteers understood the company's purpose was funding the network and running the conferences. Freenode Limited reported no activity in 2017. In 2018, current assets were reported to be £39,276, while amounts falling due to creditors within one year were reported to be £42,098. In May 2021, at least 14 Freenode staff members resigned after what they described as
13064-399: The criticism, stating that a " cancel culture mob has actively infiltrated major FOSS projects". On 14 June 2021, Freenode administrators launched a new network under the freenode name based on InspIRCd and Anope IRC services, intended to replace the previous network. Unlike previous migrations, none of the data from the old network, such as user and channel registration, was migrated over to
13206-507: The development of the ircd should evolve. Most notably, the "European" (most of those servers were in Europe) side that later named itself IRCnet argued for nick and channel delays whereas the EFnet side argued for timestamps. There were also disagreements about policies: the European side had started to establish a set of rules directing what IRCops could and could not do, a point of view opposed by
13348-559: The device becomes infected. The IoT device itself is not the direct target of the attack, it is used as a part of a larger attack. Once the hacker has enslaved the desired number of devices, they instruct the devices to try to contact an ISP. In October 2016, a Mirai botnet attacked Dyn which is the ISP for sites such as Twitter , Netflix , etc. As soon as this occurred, these websites were all unreachable for several hours. RUDY attack targets web applications by starvation of available sessions on
13490-432: The distributed denial-of-service attack, a PDoS attack exploits security flaws which allow remote administration on the management interfaces of the victim's hardware, such as routers , printers, or other networking hardware . The attacker uses these vulnerabilities to replace a device's firmware with a modified, corrupt, or defective firmware image—a process which when done legitimately is known as flashing. The intent
13632-631: The events, various organisations using Freenode – including Arch Linux , CentOS , FreeBSD , the Free Software Foundation , Free Software Foundation Europe , Gentoo Linux , KDE , LineageOS , Slackware , Ubuntu , and the Wikimedia Foundation – moved their channels to Libera Chat , a network created by former Freenode staff. Others like Haiku or Alpine Linux moved to the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC). By 16 August 2021, over
13774-425: The fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) faced DDoS attacks, disrupting services. Anonymous Sudan , claiming the attack for religious and political reasons, was viewed skeptically by AO3 and experts. Flashpoint, a threat intelligence vendor, noted the group's past activities but doubted their stated motives. AO3, supported by the non-profit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and reliant on donations,
13916-407: The fields in an IP header is the fragment offset field, indicating the starting position, or offset, of the data contained in a fragmented packet relative to the data in the original packet. If the sum of the offset and size of one fragmented packet differs from that of the next fragmented packet, the packets overlap. When this happens, a server vulnerable to teardrop attacks is unable to reassemble
14058-399: The first major disagreement took place in the IRC world. The "A-net" (Anarchy net) included a server named eris.berkeley.edu. It was all open, required no passwords and had no limit on the number of connects. As Greg "wumpus" Lindahl explains: "it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and nick-colliding everyone". The "Eris Free Network", EFnet , made the eris machine
14200-451: The first to be Q-lined (Q for quarantine) from IRC. In wumpus' words again: "Eris refused to remove that line, so I formed EFnet. It wasn't much of a fight; I got all the hubs to join, and almost everyone else got carried along." A-net was formed with the eris servers, while EFnet was formed with the non-eris servers. History showed most servers and users went with EFnet. Once A-net disbanded, the name EFnet became meaningless, and once again it
14342-574: The flooding hosts send Echo Requests to the broadcast addresses of mis-configured networks, thereby enticing hosts to send Echo Reply packets to the victim. Some early DDoS programs implemented a distributed form of this attack. Amplification attacks are used to magnify the bandwidth that is sent to a victim. Many services can be exploited to act as reflectors, some harder to block than others. US-CERT have observed that different services may result in different amplification factors, as tabulated below: DNS amplification attacks involves an attacker sending
14484-597: The group Anonymous . These attacks can use different types of internet packets such as TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc. These collections of compromised systems are known as botnets . DDoS tools like Stacheldraht still use classic DoS attack methods centered on IP spoofing and amplification like smurf attacks and fraggle attacks (types of bandwidth consumption attacks). SYN floods (a resource starvation attack) may also be used. Newer tools can use DNS servers for DoS purposes. Unlike MyDoom's DDoS mechanism, botnets can be turned against any IP address. Script kiddies use them to deny
14626-617: The largest network for the free software community , and 20th largest in the world. In 2002, the name changed to Freenode. The OPN domains were later put up for sale, but did not sell. In 2002 the Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC) was founded to support Freenode. PDPC was incorporated in Texas and the IRS recognised it as a 501(c)(3) charity from 2002 until approximately 2010, during which it received support from such organizations as
14768-407: The leading method in DDoS incidents, accounting for 63% of all DDoS activity. This includes tactics like TCP SYN , TCP ACK, and TCP floods. With TCP being the most widespread networking protocol, its attacks are expected to remain prevalent in the DDoS threat scene. In 2015, DDoS botnets such as DD4BC grew in prominence, taking aim at financial institutions. Cyber-extortionists typically begin with
14910-405: The local area network (internal communication). IRC has a line-based structure. Clients send single-line messages to the server, receive replies to those messages and receive copies of some messages sent by other clients. In most clients, users can enter commands by prefixing them with a '/'. Depending on the command, these may either be handled entirely by the client, or (generally for commands
15052-762: The mass resignations. Anil Dash , a technology entrepreneur, stated that it was "heartbreaking to see Freenode in disarray after decades of being a vital open platform for communities." Jackie Singh, a cybersecurity engineer, also thanked former Freenode staff members for their work. On 26 May 2021, Freenode took control of approximately 700 registered channels – including those of Gentoo Linux , Raku , Elixir and Haskell – which had migrated or intended to migrate to Libera Chat. This came after Freenode modified its off-topic policy to prohibit "inappropriate advertising" several days prior. The Gentoo Linux project said "We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode." Lee dismissed
15194-545: The maximum number of open connections or filling the victim's disk space with logs. An attacker with shell-level access to a victim's computer may slow it until it is unusable or crash it by using a fork bomb . Another kind of application-level DoS attack is XDoS (or XML DoS) which can be controlled by modern web application firewalls (WAFs). All attacks belonging to the category of timeout exploiting . Slow DoS attacks implement an application-layer attack. Examples of threats are Slowloris, establishing pending connections with
15336-402: The names message used to establish initial channel state can only send one such mode per user on the channel, but multiple such modes can be set on a single user. For example, if a user holds both operator status (+o) and voice status (+v) on a channel, a new client will be unable to see the mode with less priority (i.e. voice). Workarounds for this are possible on both the client and server side;
15478-505: The new network. The network previously focused on supporting peer-directed and open-source projects. In 1999, Freenode ran an IRCd called Dancer (based on IRC-Hybrid), then switched to Hyperion in 2005. Hyperion was then replaced with IRCd-Seven, a Freenode-specific fork of Charybdis, on 30 January 2010, using Atheme services, which were originally developed for use on Freenode. As of June 2021, Freenode ran Anope IRC Services and InspIRCd . The Peer-Directed Projects Center ( PDPC )
15620-474: The new user count record was set to 57 users. In May 1993, RFC 1459 was published and details a simple protocol for client/server operation, channels, one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. A significant number of extensions like CTCP, colors and formats are not included in the protocol specifications, nor is character encoding, which led various implementations of servers and clients to diverge. Software implementation varied significantly from one network to
15762-574: The open source Libera Chat , founded in May 2021, has the most users, with 20,374 channels on 26 servers; between them, the top 100 IRC networks share over 100 thousand channels operating on about one thousand servers. After its golden era during the 1990s and early 2000s (240,000 users on QuakeNet in 2004), IRC has seen a significant decline, losing around 60% of users between 2003 and 2012, with users moving to social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter , but also to open platforms such as XMPP which
15904-425: The other hand, if an attacker uses many systems to simultaneously launch attacks against a remote host, this would be classified as a DDoS attack. Malware can carry DDoS attack mechanisms; one of the better-known examples of this was MyDoom . Its DoS mechanism was triggered on a specific date and time. This type of DDoS involved hardcoding the target IP address before releasing the malware and no further interaction
16046-534: The other, each network implementing their own policies and standards in their own code bases. During the summer of 1994, the Undernet was itself forked. The new network was called DALnet (named after its founder: dalvenjah), formed for better user service and more user and channel protections. One of the more significant changes in DALnet was use of longer nicknames (the original ircd limit being 9 letters). DALnet ircd modifications were made by Alexei "Lefler" Kosut. DALnet
16188-518: The packets resulting in a denial-of-service condition. Voice over IP has made abusive origination of large numbers of telephone voice calls inexpensive and easily automated while permitting call origins to be misrepresented through caller ID spoofing . According to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation , telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) has appeared as part of various fraudulent schemes: TDoS can exist even without Internet telephony . In
16330-419: The port typically used for IRC, was not blocked. The group used Encyclopedia Dramatica (a user-modifiable wiki, like Misplaced Pages) as a distribution vector, with the flooded messages directing users to click on a link to the modified Encyclopedia Dramatica page, causing those users to also become involved and resulting in a cascading snowball effect . Weev , one of the group members responsible, later claimed that
16472-497: The protocol implemented in the irc2.4.0 version of the IRC2 server, and documented in RFC 1459. Since RFC 1459 was published, the new features in the irc2.10 implementation led to the publication of several revised protocol documents (RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812 and RFC 2813); however, these protocol changes have not been widely adopted among other implementations. Although many specifications on
16614-414: The provider to meet the defined QoS levels for the increased requests. The main incentive behind such attacks may be to drive the application owner to raise the elasticity levels to handle the increased application traffic, to cause financial losses, or force them to become less competitive. A banana attack is another particular type of DoS. It involves redirecting outgoing messages from the client back onto
16756-403: The same spoofed IP source, which will result in a massive amount of data being sent back to the victim. It is very difficult to defend against these types of attacks because the response data is coming from legitimate servers. These attack requests are also sent through UDP, which does not require a connection to the server. This means that the source IP is not verified when a request is received by
16898-470: The server's connection pool. The slow read is achieved by advertising a very small number for the TCP Receive Window size, and at the same time emptying clients' TCP receive buffer slowly, which causes a very low data flow rate. A sophisticated low-bandwidth DDoS attack is a form of DoS that uses less traffic and increases its effectiveness by aiming at a weak point in the victim's system design, i.e.,
17040-583: The server. To bring awareness of these vulnerabilities, campaigns have been started that are dedicated to finding amplification vectors which have led to people fixing their resolvers or having the resolvers shut down completely. The Mirai botnet works by using a computer worm to infect hundreds of thousands of IoT devices across the internet. The worm propagates through networks and systems taking control of poorly protected IoT devices such as thermostats, Wi-Fi-enabled clocks, and washing machines. The owner or user will usually have no immediate indication of when
17182-418: The song " 867-5309/Jenny ". TDoS differs from other telephone harassment (such as prank calls and obscene phone calls ) by the number of calls originated. By occupying lines continuously with repeated automated calls, the victim is prevented from making or receiving both routine and emergency telephone calls. Related exploits include SMS flooding attacks and black fax or continuous fax transmission by using
17324-590: The target's system resources. Bandwidth-saturating floods rely on the attacker's ability to generate the overwhelming flux of packets. A common way of achieving this today is via distributed denial-of-service, employing a botnet . An application layer DDoS attack is done mainly for specific targeted purposes, including disrupting transactions and access to databases. It requires fewer resources than network layer attacks but often accompanies them. An attack may be disguised to look like legitimate traffic, except it targets specific application packets or functions. The attack on
17466-466: The third-oldest ISP in the world, was the target of what is thought to be the first DoS attack. On September 6, 1996, Panix was subject to a SYN flood attack, which brought down its services for several days while hardware vendors, notably Cisco , figured out a proper defense. Another early demonstration of the DoS attack was made by Khan C. Smith in 1997 during a DEF CON event, disrupting Internet access to
17608-407: The tools are embedded in malware and launch their attacks without the knowledge of the system owner. Stacheldraht is a classic example of a DDoS tool. It uses a layered structure where the attacker uses a client program to connect to handlers which are compromised systems that issue commands to the zombie agents which in turn facilitate the DDoS attack. Agents are compromised via the handlers by
17750-785: The top 100 IRC networks served more than 200,000 users at a time. IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland , where he was working at the Department of Information Processing Science. Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented
17892-403: The underlying network, require a net-split and net-join. This results in a lot of network traffic and spurious quit/join messages to users and temporary loss of communication to users on the splitting servers. Adding a server to a large network means a large background bandwidth load on the network and a large memory load on the server. Once established, however, each message to multiple recipients
18034-527: The use of IRC for free software and open-source projects. Levin was one of the founders of the Open Projects Network (OPN), and later of the PDPC. In 2003, The Register (UK) reported that Levin mismanaged funds intended for the OPN, quoting him as writing that they went "to paying bills, to paying the rent, to buying food and necessities." On 12 September 2006, Levin was struck by a car while riding
18176-537: The use of free software through supporting its development. Until June 2021, the GNU Project used the Freenode network for communication. The PDPC was founded and initially directed by Rob Levin. In November 2006, the board went through a reshuffle and new members were installed. Seth Schoen left and Christel Dahlskjaer, senior Freenode staffer, became the secretary and head of staff on Freenode in Schoen's place. Also joining
18318-448: The user interface. The OSI application layer is responsible for displaying data and images to the user in a human-recognizable format and to interface with the presentation layer below it. In an implementation, the application and presentation layers are frequently combined. The simplest DoS attack relies primarily on brute force, flooding the target with an overwhelming flux of packets, oversaturating its connection bandwidth or depleting
18460-499: The victim scales back down, the attack resumes, causing resources to scale back up again. This can result in a reduced quality of service during the periods of scaling up and down and a financial drain on resources during periods of over-provisioning while operating with a lower cost for an attacker compared to a normal DDoS attack, as it only needs to be generating traffic for a portion of the attack period. An application layer DDoS attack (sometimes referred to as layer 7 DDoS attack )
18602-418: The victim's computer and can even make it unusable during such an attack. Ping flood is based on sending the victim an overwhelming number of ping packets, usually using the ping command from Unix-like hosts. It is very simple to launch, the primary requirement being access to greater bandwidth than the victim. Ping of death is based on sending the victim a malformed ping packet, which will lead to
18744-482: The victim, or SlowDroid , an attack running on mobile devices. Another target of DDoS attacks may be to produce added costs for the application operator, when the latter uses resources based on cloud computing . In this case, normally application-used resources are tied to a needed quality of service (QoS) level (e.g. responses should be less than 200 ms) and this rule is usually linked to automated software (e.g. Amazon CloudWatch ) to raise more virtual resources from
18886-562: The web server. Much like Slowloris, RUDY keeps sessions at halt using never-ending POST transmissions and sending an arbitrarily large content-length header value. Manipulating maximum segment size and selective acknowledgement (SACK) may be used by a remote peer to cause a denial of service by an integer overflow in the Linux kernel, potentially causing a kernel panic . Jonathan Looney discovered CVE - 2019-11477 , CVE- 2019-11478 , CVE- 2019-11479 on June 17, 2019. The shrew attack
19028-454: The web. Marketed and promoted as stress-testing tools, they can be used to perform unauthorized denial-of-service attacks, and allow technically unsophisticated attackers access to sophisticated attack tools. Usually powered by a botnet, the traffic produced by a consumer stresser can range anywhere from 5-50 Gbit/s, which can, in most cases, deny the average home user internet access. A Markov-modulated denial-of-service attack occurs when
19170-591: Was assigned port 194/TCP by IANA . However, the de facto standard has always been to run IRC on 6667/TCP and nearby port numbers (for example TCP ports 6660–6669, 7000) to avoid having to run the IRCd software with root privileges . The protocol specified that characters were 8-bit but did not specify the character encoding the text was supposed to use. This can cause problems when users using different clients and/or different platforms want to converse. All client-to-server IRC protocols in use today are descended from
19312-444: Was developed in 1999. Certain networks such as Freenode have not followed the overall trend and have more than quadrupled in size during the same period. However, Freenode, which in 2016 had around 90,000 users, has since declined to about 9,300 users. The largest IRC networks have traditionally been grouped as the "Big Four" —a designation for networks that top the statistics. The Big Four networks change periodically, but due to
19454-408: Was necessary to launch the attack. A system may also be compromised with a trojan containing a zombie agent . Attackers can also break into systems using automated tools that exploit flaws in programs that listen for connections from remote hosts. This scenario primarily concerns systems acting as servers on the web. Stacheldraht is a classic example of a DDoS tool. It uses a layered structure where
19596-554: Was the chat part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala and Jukka Pihl. The first IRC network was running on a single server named tolsun.oulu.fi. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay , which operated on the BITNET . Jyrki Kuoppala pushed Oikarinen to ask Oulu University to free the IRC code so that it also could be run outside of Oulu, and after they finally got it released, Jyrki Kuoppala immediately installed another server. This
19738-561: Was the first "IRC network". Oikarinen got some friends at the Helsinki University of Technology and Tampere University of Technology to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. At this time Oikarinen realized that the rest of the BBS features probably would not fit in his program. Oikarinen contacted people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University . They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to
19880-538: Was the one and only IRC network. Around that time IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt throughout a media blackout . It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War . Chat logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive. Another fork effort, the first that made a lasting difference, was initiated by "Wildthang" in the United States in October 1992. (It forked off
20022-537: Was thought to be an attack executed by an unnamed customer of the US-based service provider Arbor Networks , reaching a peak of about 1.7 Tb/s . In February 2020, Amazon Web Services experienced an attack with a peak volume of 2.3 Tb/s . In July 2021, CDN Provider Cloudflare boasted of protecting its client from a DDoS attack from a global Mirai botnet that was up to 17.2 million requests per second. Russian DDoS prevention provider Yandex said it blocked
20164-499: Was thus based on the Undernet ircd server, although the DALnet pioneers were EFnet abandoners. According to James Ng, the initial DALnet people were "ops in #StarTrek sick from the constant splits/lags/takeovers/etc". DALnet quickly offered global WallOps (IRCop messages that can be seen by users who are +w (/mode NickName +w)), longer nicknames, Q:Lined nicknames (nicknames that cannot be used i.e. ChanServ, IRCop, NickServ, etc.), global K:Lines (ban of one person or an entire domain from
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