For the past few days DALnet has suffered crippling DDoS attacks. I have found a couple of stories (in order of what came first) that may explain why this IRC network has dropped off the charts.
On December 14, 2000 TheRegister.co.uk pubished this story.
“DALnet debilitated by DoS attacks
By John Leyden
Posted: 10/12/2002 at 18:30 GMT
DALnet, one of the world’s biggest IRC service providers, has apologised to its users for disruptions caused by an unusually fierce DDoS attack over the weekend, whose effects are continuing to be felt.
“It is a sad fact that it has been somewhat difficult to connect to DALnet for some time,” a notice to its users explains. “There are several reasons for this, including ongoing attacks and a loss of servers.
“This weekend, these problems have increased. DALnet has been under an unusually strong, unusually persistent attack. These attacks are directed at all DALnet client servers, rather than just a few.”
DALnet’s volunteer administrators is working with service providers and with police to stop these attacks, which are far from easy to block. It’s far from the first such attack (which are unfortunately all too easy to carry out), but it is one of the most serious to date.
IRC is a non-profit, non-commercial, text-oriented chat environment, which is run by volunteers and is kept alive with donated hardware and bandwidth. DALnet is currently the largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with over 140,000 concurrent users and 600,000 registered users, from all over the world. It started in 1994 but now crippling attacks by unknown DDoS kiddiots threaten its future by making the service too expensive to maintain.
We hope they’re pleased with themselves.
DALnet user, and Reg reader Richard Revis bemoans the fact that the service has being reduced from around 140,000 to only supporting under 2,000 users by “illiterate Windoze users letting script kiddies use their computers to launch DDoS attacks”.
“So far several company supported servers have been forced to delink as companies feel the pressure of supporting a free service which is generating so much malicious traffic,” he adds. ® ”
On December 22, 2000, the DALnet exploits team published this story:
“DDoS Attacks – A Message to our Userbase.
DALnet recently suffered a prolongued and heavy DDoS attack, the origins of which are still unknown to us. At present the attacks seem to have eased slightly and some servers are now able to hold clients. We cannot guarantee this will last or that the attacks will not recommence, however we would like to extend our continuing thanks to the many loyal users who have remained with DALnet through our current troubles and assure you that we are doing everything in our power to minimise the disruption caused by these attacks.
If you have any information which may be of use to us in tracing the perpetrators of these attacks, please use the contact form on http://kline.dal.net/exploits/info.htm
This announcement was last updated on Sunday, December 22, 2002 3:44 GMT”
Yesterday, Irc-Junkie.org published this story:
“More DDoS attacks on DALnet Saturday, January 11 2003 by Asmo
As Curve, editor of the DALnet ezine explains in a email to the DALnet mailinglist;
“For the past few days DALnet has, yet again, been crippled by massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks. We have, at times, been left with no client servers for you, our users, to connect to. For that we can only apologise, and assure you that DALnet administration is working with law enforcement and service providers to try and stem this tide of electronic vandalism.”
Next on she explains how ordinary computers from you and me are used as attacking machines in such DDoS attacks, and how such attacks could have been prevented if the users would only secure their machine;
“Please remember, these sorts of attacks cannot happen if each and every person were to ensure that their computers are secure by disabling any un-necessary services (file sharing etc), and by running a good anti-virus program and
firewall.”
Finally she tries to encourage everyone to report suspicious activity to law enforcement agencies, and if you may find any channels full of suspicious bots, report them to a IRC operator. These IRC operators can usually be found in the networks helpchannels, often these channels are listen in the MOTD when you connect. You can retrieve them later on with using the command /motd. “
There is little to NO information regarding the recent outtage. The DALnet home page is also down. It looks like DALnet my be down for good, and that’s exactly what alot of people on places like Undernet are saying. What are your thoughts?
My personal hope is that this is not the end, but only time will tell…
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- Could Attack On DALnet Spell End For IRC?
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- Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead
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