April 02, 2007

University of Missouri-Columbia Absurdly Blocks IRC

The University of Missouri-Columbia has blocked connections to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks according to a story published at Dark Reading.

The only catch with the IRC block is that sometimes users have legitimate reasons to be running an IRC session with other users for gaming or academic reasons. Brokken admits there's really no way for the system to know for sure if it's a bot communiqu'e. "We look at how many times a user is getting quarantined for IRC. If you do something that violated policy, we will kick you off for one hour to see if you are still doing it," he says. "If you were infected and clean it up, an hour later you're back on the network."

At first the university did inadvertently snare some legit IRC users. But since then, the false positives have dropped to few or none. "We figure that when people using IRC as a normal business practice learn about the restriction on it, they do something else instead. So now we don't have a lot of false positives," he says.

Translation: To damn with the legitimate uses, lets just ban it and ignore that fact! Maybe no one will notice. Oh and people aren't using it as much as they used to...well because they can't use it now. ha ha ha!

This is perhaps the most ridiculous statement I've ever seen used by an organization blocking IRC.

The article at Dark Reading goes on to correctly mention that botnets are moving away from IRC. The amount of botnets still operating on IRC is shrinking everyday so these blocks do little BUT continue to inconvenience legitimate users.

I hope no one tells the University of Missouri-Columbia that viruses spread by email too, otherwise they might block all email next.

[University Cleans Up Bots on Campus]

Posted in IRC News by #!/usr/bin/geek at 2007-04-02 02:12 Eastern

Tags: University of Missouri-Columbia botnets zombies zombie botnet internet relay chat