[Hftqdxpm]

I want to set up a IRC channel and have heard of 'channel hijacking'. Have you ever encountered the problem of your IRC channel being hijacked (or unauthorised users entering your channel)?

How can you protect your IRC channel from hijacking?

Must the IRC channel hijacker need to know your IRC channel password or he can use other means to hijack a channel?

Finally, how hard is it to catch and take action against a channel hijacker?

Sorry if these questions are ameteurish but I'm new to mIRC.

[zawhmqswly]

Sorry if these questions are ameteurish but I'm new to mIRC.

But not to paranoia, it seems.

[WaydayNef]

yes its possible but depending on the network you should be able to get it back easily.

for e.g. on quakenet you can reg your channel and Q/L bot will join in and hold the channel for you if everyone leaves

however Q/L can be down for maintenance or disappear due to server splits, at this point people can grab your channel provided nobody is inside.

However usually Q will reenter and de-op anyone that wasn't op-ed when it left/split.

[Hftqdxpm]

yes its possible but depending on the network you should be able to get it back easily.

for e.g. on quakenet you can reg your channel and Q/L bot will join in and hold the channel for you if everyone leaves

however Q/L can be down for maintenance or disappear due to server splits, at this point people can grab your channel provided nobody is inside.

However usually Q will reenter and de-op anyone that wasn't op-ed when it left/split.

So on IRC servers without this special Q/L bot, anybody can enter my empty channel without typing in the password I configured for it?

If that is true, I wonder what was the use of the channel password in the 1st place.

* One night, I leave my IRC channel empty and power off my computer and the next morning I discover it's been hijacked...