Network News

For the month of April 2003 only, users who register their copy of mIRC will see 100% of the registration fee generously donated to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Iraq appeal.

As of today, Austnet users will be able to access the support section of this website via the address http://support.austnet.org, and the community section by http://community.austnet.org. Chat users can simply type http://chat.austnet.org.

Last night Mission resigned from ASD, for personal reasons. He will be sorely missed, particularly by our EU and US users who were helped by him in the early hours of the AU morning. Mission was a helper for 10 months with the Department.

Congratulations to Webby, who has become the latest addition to the Austnet Services Department helper team. Webby has has association with #asd for some time, and is a welcome addition to the Dept.

A new cyber-stalking law for Victoria, Australia, has world-wide implications, for those who stalk people on the net, or via email, impersonate others or post false information about others. See the full article HERE.

Wallops-watchers were shocked this morning to be told that Austnet's domain has expired and had been registered by someone in Kansas, and that AustNet would be closing down in the next few days. Luckily for all this was just Hawkon's April Fools day joke :)

Last night, AustNet peaked again - reaching 13919 concurrent connections. This is about the 4th time that AustNet has reached a new peak in recent history and demonstrates that our userbase and the network are growing healthily. Congrats guys and gals!

As of today, AustNet statistics for the past 24 hours will be available on the site in graph form. User count, channels, server count and IRC Operator count are all graphed, updated hourly. In coming weeks we hope to add weekly graphs and longer term graphs.

Routing has extended the kas.* server's testlink for an extra 30 days due to administrational reasons. The server's vote and DNS entrys will be remain suspended until if/when the server is permlinked.

An old worm (wkbot) has been re-released into the wild with currently a high payload. The majority of people receive this virus from kazaa/imesh/IRC. As a means to help others infected with the ident problem Austnet has ignored the idents of affected users.
The things to look out for are your ident being set to LL????? (random numbers replace the question marks) or a file called cmd32.exe or system32.exe. If you or a friend has found this then might be a good idea to take a visit into #ava for some assistance. As yet there is no fixfile for this virus and the online scanners are struggling to remove it (although they do detect it)

This virus has many malicious functions, some of these include;
Opens two randomly selected TCP and UDP ports to connect to the hacker.
Listens for the commands from the hacker using its own IRC channel.
The commands allow the hacker to perform any of the following actions:
Upgrade the worm
Steal the system/network information and send it to the hacker
Download and execute files
Perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against the hacker's targets
Send the worm to other IRC users
More information on this virus can be obtained from #ava or from Symantec