Slashdot Mirror
IRC Networks Unite in Fight Against Fizzer Worm
Dave writes "Over the past few days, IRC Networks across the internet have felt the brunt of the Fizzer worm. In an unusual display of geek solidarity, representatives from dozens of IRC Networks, including EFNet, IRCNet and DALnet, have gathered to create a Fizzer Task Force. Interesting, and mostly productive results have occurred so far from such a meeting of the IRC minds."
That note was from 2 years ago. Undernet is still going strong today and remains one of the largest IRC networks.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This does not affect mIRC or any other IRC Client, at all.
The fizzer worm that's currently spreading, spreads through outlook and Kazaa. It also has a IRC backdoor, through which presumably the virus author can access infected computers. This IRC backdoor connects to a list of several irc servers, and sit in a channel.
As the number of infected computers (Please people, update your Anti Virus software!) is growing, this puts a higher load on the irc servers. This is what it's all about, to find a way to get rid of the trojans from the servers, so that nobody can abuse them for DDoS or looking for CC numbers or other private info on infected machines, in a way that doesn't put too much stress on the IRC servers.
AVG AntiVirus Free Edition is available here: http://www.grisoft.com When I used to use windows, AVG was IMO the best antivirus out there in terms of speed and detection, compared to mcAfee and norton.
$cat
QuakeNet probably won't get targeted as they have a highly active anti-worm/trojan squad equipped with a trojan scanner (my work) and other services which hunt the network for flood clones/trojans/illegal botnets automatically.
F-Prot is what I use, and the DOS version is free: www.f-secure.com
*NIX/Linux systems can be at risk if you're using a misconfigured wine.
Seriously, wine is getting better every month and can run a wider lot of window$ software, it is not surprising that it will (could?) run windows worms/viruses (which are software written by human after all) and put our supposed-virus-free-OS [insert your preferred flavour of unix here] at the same level of risk than windoze users.
Please think about it if you install such a software...
For those unaware of what the Fizzer worm does and stuff. You can find most stuff here.