Florence Devouard wrote:

Hi

If you are of the same type than I, you may have had troubles to connect to any of freenode channels for the past 15 hours or so. It seems some irc clients mention the problem, others do not do anything except for endlessly looking for the channel and not finding it (that was my case).

It seems to be a spambot attack on freenode. You may try the channel chat.freenode.net. It works.

Nevertheless, discussions are difficult to keep up with, due to users endlessly automatically quitting and joining. Private channels are at least working :-)

I only post this here to avoid being confused with a spammer, so please have the information circulate as needed :-)

ant

[12:59] <lilo> Anthere: I believe we have the problems taken care of now [12:59] <lilo> Anthere: major clonebot attack [13:00] <lilo> Anthere: the freenode website contained a news article, and several major pages had information [13:00] <Anthere> link ? [13:00] * lilo hopes people will look on the website if there's a connectivity problem, as it may save them worry and help them get reconnected sooner [13:00] <lilo> http://freenode.net/ [13:00] <Anthere> k [13:01] <Anthere> thanks [13:01] <lilo> there's also http://freenode.net/news.shtml [13:01] <lilo> but if you just go to the main page there's enough information [13:01] <lilo> Anthere: luckily, in the process of replacing the main rotation we were able to sniff out an approach to attacking the spambots [13:02] <lilo> Anthere: and we're just implementing that now [13:02] <Anthere> I'll post that information, so that people do not believe *their* computer is the problem :-) [13:02] <lilo> Anthere: it's not guaranteed to work forever though; I think we'll be slowly phasing in the new hostname as a way to be a little less high profile for conventional spambot attacks [13:03] <lilo> Anthere: we do have a new approach to try to find distinguishing characteristics for the clonebots, but there's no guarantee it will work every time [13:03] <Anthere> there was another attack pretty recently, was not it ? [13:03] <Ryo_> lilo: thanks for the work on the servers [13:03] <lilo> Anthere: there's been a spambot infestation for months; the spambots were tweaked on Friday and ended up on different channels

That should summarize the issue....

Anthere