This past weekend although at home I spent quite a bit of time in Freenode IRC channels for BarCamp and BloggerCon. There were all these weird messages popping up in the corner of my screen - now I know why....

The world's largest FOSS IRC network, FreeNode, has been (for lack of a better word) hijacked. The culprit, who went by the nickname ratbert, seems to have nabbed the privleges of Robert Levin, President and Executive Director of Peer-Directed Projects Center (FreeNode's parent organization), AKA lilo. Whew! As if that wasn't enough in itself, ratbert pushed out an offensive global message and attempted a DCC SEND exploit. He then proceded to kill and/or k-line every staff member in sight, including lilo, and brought down quite a few of FreeNode's servers.

The rest is too broad and too long to log in full, but mainly consists of FreeNode staff members being killed (with some colorfully interesting reason messages) and cries of "MAYDAY! MAYDAY!" and other expressions of terror throughout the many channels of FreeNode.