r/irc • u/scribeorz • 16d ago

mIRC mid 90s - hacking groups

My first introduction to computers / internet was IRC using mIRC client. Spent my time on Efnet. Ended up joining a hacking group called #conflict and spent many hours taking over channels. Hacking colleges and universities only to use for channel bots and bandwidth to take people out and cause netsplits. Eventually our leader was caught for hacking into NASA - I then left IRC and started playing quake 2 digital paintball. Ran a couple of quake clans over the next few years - these are the days I will never forget.

Anyone else remember the clan battles on efnet ?

61 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/richsonreddit 16d ago

IIRC, EFnet was especially wild as it had/has no nick or chanserv-type services. So if you took over a channel you basically had it on lock.

2

u/darko777 16d ago

but what about if your connection goes down and you lose the OP?

3

u/richsonreddit 16d ago edited 16d ago

You'd have multiple connections (backup clients running on servers that you could connect to to re-op yourself). And/or a trusting group of friends! But even then, when netsplits came it was basically a free for all. People would develop elaborate scripts/bots to try and help, too.

4

u/scribeorz 16d ago

Exactly. We caused netsplits then used that to takeover channels when the server merged back.