Spambot attack

Earlier this morning, the freenode network was hit by a fairly extensive spambot attack, the spambots were distributing links to images that users have reported as containing child pornography images. Naturally, we are escalating the attack to law enforcement, but we would strongly encourage users to be vigilant and careful not to open links from users you do not know.

While the attacks are ongoing we have chosen to update the default umodes for users to include +R, please note that this means you will not receive messages from unregistered users and you will need to /mode yournick -R in order to allow those to come through. If you choose to set yourself -R, please be cautious of clicking on any links from unregistered users that you do not know.

At the height of the attack, one of the klines set resulted in a utility bot attempting to ban all users connected to the network, I can only apologise for this and we are looking into what happened.

Again, apologies for the disruption and please be cautious.