Blacklisting Usernames in Charybdis

Stardate: 90671.98

For our ircd needs we use patched versions of Charybdis and Atheme. I discovered the other day that one of our users had been trying to use the nickname 'help'. It was discovered he was just a beginner trying to find the help for the /nick command. The interesting thing was that this was tripping alarms for another user. Nickserv will warn you when someone tries to use your nick. Another user had messaged me that someone was attempting to take their nick. After doing some digging I realized that the second user had registered the nick 'help' with NickServ.

Allowing users to use nicks like 'help' and 'support' open the door to social engineering attacks. I set out to block them at a services/ircd level. To my suprise this was done at the ircd level not at the services level. Big shoutout to 'grawity' on #atheme on irc.atheme.org.

Make sure you are logged in as an oper and that you have OperServ enabled. Get help on the command:

/msg OperServ SQLINE help

Add a sqline with:

/msg OperServ SQLINE add help !P abuse

The !P means permanent(you can use !T to do a temporary ban), the 'help' is the nick to ban(you can also use masks), and the abuse is an arbitrary string you can use to mention a reason for the sqline.

List active sqlines with:

 SQLINE list:
 1: help - by oper1 - permanent
 2: support - by oper1 - permanent
 3: helpdesk - by oper1 - permanent
 Total of 3 entries in SQLINE list.