Nick Collision
Another popular form of channel takeover abuses nickname collision protection, which keeps two users from having the same nickname at once. A user on one side of a netsplit takes the nickname of a target on the other side of the split; when the servers reconnect, the nicks collide and both users are killed from the server. The attacker then reconnects or switches nicks in a second client while the target reconnects, and proceeds to jupe (or block) the target's nickname for a period of time.
User timestamping is often used to detect these kinds of attacks in a fashion similar to channel timestamping, with the user who selected that nickname later being kicked from the server. Another protection method, called nickhold, disallows the use of recently split nicknames. This causes fewer kicks, but causes more inconvenience to users. For this reason, timestamping is generally more common. Some servers, such as ircd-ratbox, do both. IRC services and bots can also protect against such attacks by requiring that a password be supplied to use a certain nick. Users who do not provide a password are killed after a certain amount of time.
Read more about this topic: Internet Relay Chat Takeover
Famous quotes containing the words nick and/or collision:
“I’ve met a lot of murderers in my day, but Dr. Garth, whatever he is, is the first man I’ve ever met who was polite to me and still made the chills run up and down my back.”
—Robert D. Andrews, and Nick Grindé. Police detective, Before I Hang, describing his meeting with Dr. Garth (1940)
“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane’s rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)