Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
Issue: 51   Editor: Nyxxiekins


Tales of an IRC Bot`s Spam Nyxxiekins
If any Bootleggers IRC fan has paid any sort of attention to the official Bootleggers Channel and server, they'd notice a certain spammer attacking the IRC and it's players via Personal Messages, notifications and repeating messages on the channel on a daily basis.

He goes by the name of Brad, and Brad's story starts out with, what he calls, an unfair ban by the hands of former moderator, Shaggerty.

I, myself, being the nosy journalist at heart, decided to take this story to Buzz-article levels. My nosy investigation began with a simple /whois command. The /whois command, tells the person using the command about a person's nickname used on the IRC server. I used the command on all unknown nicks on the Bootleggers IRC server. I noticed that one name, out of the four that I used the command on, was stationed in another Bootleggers channel as well as the official one. The channel, #hahaha, was unknown to me, so I continued my investigation by joining the channel.

In this channel, I found well over 4603 bots with names made up of random letters and numbers, 1/4 of which Brad said belonged to him. This was the home of the spamming bots. I quickly told someone with more power on the IRC, 5litre, about the channel and told him to join it. Upon his join, the bots quickly parted from the channel and the spamming slowly came to a halt.

"Bootleggers has been mean to me over the years and now I'm getting my revenge," stated the spammer once I tried to get to the bottom of this by asking question after question. "It's taken a while, but I've got a network finally ready to take the Bootleggers legacy down until I get my apology," he concluded.

His reasonings behind the spam attacks were due to, a ban he was served by Shaggerty when he advertised other games in the forum. "I had points on the account," said Brad, the spammer, "I paid MONEY for those points," he added. "My original plan was to destroy the domain all together," claimed the spammer

His account in question, NightsofDark, was banned for advertising by Andy, 5litre and finally, Shaggerty. Due to the Elite Guard's three strikes rule, he was banned permanently, losing his entire account forever, including the points. "Attention to the facts," was his only reasonings behind the spam when 5litre asked what he was trying to accomplish.

The spam, which isn't actually spam, is all caused by botnetting. Botnetting causes clients to disconnect from the server and in the end overloading the server.

"I reserve the right to chat here but I won't try to harm it (Bootleggers or its IRC server) in anyway," finally stated Brad after an hour of communication.

What will happen to Brad via the Elite Guard's decision is unknown to me. It is obvious that through 5litre's Operating tools, he can get the IP address of the spammer and link it to his current Bootleggers' account (which the Buzz is unknown of at the moment, or if he even has one), but what will happen to Brad and his account is unknown.

Hopefully we won't see any more unnecessary spamming anytime soon, all thanks to some simple communication.