Chats are compromised

Started by Bletchley Park

LociOiling Lv 1

It's just our friends from supernets again, they have been at this sporadically for years. (They were going as "hardchats" last summer, but more recently it's back to "supernets".)

One clue is they leave messages like "GONNA GO CHAT ON SUPERNETS" when they issue the IRC "part" command to leave a channel. These messages only show up if you're using an external IRC client. I see them in the console log on my IRC client.

They constantly change IP addresses, and use a new batch of IRC nicknames each time. So banning is not effective.

#veteran and #global are of course open to all, so no surprise they can spam there.

They also get into group channels once in a while. Apparently there's a timing glitch. There can be a momentary delay before they are kicked, and that can be long enough to post a few lines using a script. Hence the high-quality ASCII art you sometimes see.

There's also an IRC "whois" command, which gives them user names. You'll sometimes see whois output in channel. They then spam the users listed by whois with a "query", which is IRC's version of a private message. The queries only show up in external IRC, Foldit's in-game IRC just ignores them.

I'm not sure if the IRC server is in good health, although the nickserv and chanserv services seem to be running. Numbers are down, and I lost my operator privileges. After logging out and logging back in, LociOilingIRC again has op status. Most likely this was just another chat glitch, and not connected to supernets, but it's hard to be sure.

Bletchley Park Lv 1

Thank you for explaining LociOiling.
Any breach of our group channel is malicious and thus I would prefer not to use the term 'friends' in any way as not to imply they are in any way benevolent. This breach of access is punishable by law in some countries.