Welcome to irc/unity!

This is a very brief history of irc/unity and the irc-security mailing list. We'll expand on it over time.

irc/unity was formed in May 2003 as a direct result of what was known as the "fizzer crisis". In early May, the Fizzer worm was becoming a problem for IRC Networks around the world. This was due to the fact that it had a built-in list of IRC servers to connect to, gathered from the mIRC servers.ini file.

This posed a major problem for many networks, as they suddenly received a flood of connections from machines infected with Fizzer. Due to the random nature of the nicknames, idents and real names, it was nearly impossible to automatically tackle these drones using the conventional methods. One of the smaller affected networks, RealmNET, noticed that they were not alone, and were not being specifically targeted by Fizzer. At the time the staff of RealmNET and the IRC Community in general still had very little information on Fizzer. Having spoken to a number of friends on other networks, a small group of people began to gather in #fizzer on RealmNET, to discuss the problem, and to attempt to find solutions. Initially, there were only around 6 people. After an hour this had grown to 20, within two hours.. 60.

24 hours later, there were almost 300 people in the channel at any one time.

Obviously, with this many people, an IRC channel was not an effective method of communication, and so the irc-security list was born. Initially this was hosted on IC5 Networks' list server, but has recently moved to it's permanent home here at irc-unity.org.