Freenode Network Hijacked, Passwords Compromised?

tmandry writes "The world's largest FOSS IRC network, FreeNode, was hijacked (for lack of a better term) by someone who somehow got a hold of the privileges of Robert Levin, AKA lilo, the head honcho of FreeNode and its parent organization, PDPC. To make matters worse, the passwords of many users may have been compromised by someone posing as NickServ, the service that most clients are configured to send a password to upon connecting, while they reconnected to the servers that hadn't been killed. Of course, if someone was able to nab lilo's password, every user password may have been ripe for the taking. The details are still unknown, but these events raise scary questions about the actual security of FreeNode and other organizations like it."

Comments

Re:Explaining the jargon...

[dorkygeek]

Yes, we are. Now head back to your cave on Digg Avenue, troll.

Re:This is why I prefer the anarchy of efnet

[weevlos]

Yes, because a couple hours of work ruining a target we disliked was really the sole limit of our contribution to humanity. I'm sure as a snarky comment poster on slashdot you are perfectly capable of auditing code for 0-day vulnerabilities and then writing exploits for said vulnerabilities. Then you'd be perfectly capable of using them to root a box on the same switch as a freenode server and using ARP spoofing to play man-in-the-middle to all incoming connections. Petty tricks like these are surely not useful except for ruining Rob Levin! We should be ashamed at our lack of skill.

Re:Horse Testicles

[DJCacophony]

Freenode wasn't hijacked, Jmax of gnaa just squit the network.

Re:This is why I prefer the anarchy of efnet

[Overly Critical Guy]

No, it's idiots from Hollywood stealing our word and our name for nothing but an attempt to squash yet another penny from Joe Sixpack and soccer moms.

It's not "idiots from Hollywood" taking "our" name. It's the majority of the population using the word in a certain way. You can keep painting some hijacking situation, but it's never going to stop the fact people use hacker a certain way. Hollywood didn't have much to do with it.

Just because a majority of the mindless part of the society fails to understand a word, the word doesn't change its meaning.

In short, yes, it does. It doesn't make people "mindless" just because they don't snap to attention and fit their language around your rigid little definition just to make you feel better. You come off as one of those angry, anti-social UNIX types who gets upset over completely trivial things like the usage of the word "hacker."