The MIRC Workshop
Tutorials, Scripts and Help Files for mIRC

Floods and Flooding Attacks

Floods are simply more data than you can handle. The majority of good servers have at least some measure of flood protection, and will disconnect you if you flood the server. However using clones or allies it is possible to flood without triggering the automatic protections.

MIRC and pIRCh, along with most *good* IRC clients have some flood protection built in. If a user sends more than the allowance specified in the floods section of the options your client will ignore them for a specified time, which is generally around 30 seconds.

However, that only protects against text floods in the main, so you may still be vulnerable to dcc floods and ctcp floods, control code floods or other excesses of info designed to lag your client.

Luckily, basic flood protection is easy to find in almost any script archive. A flood attack is not a wonder of technical prowess. A dcc flood can be caused by a method as simple as choosing to dcc send and then selecting about 20 files all at once. Hardly genious or kewl is it?

A ctcp ignore (see Non-Tech page, Ignores) will stop CTCP floods and DCC floods with ease. The following Events script acts as a simple flood protection against all CTCP floods (see Events page for more).

While flooding attacks are hardly the pursuits of an intellectual, they can be devastatingly effective if a powerful enough flood is used. Floods from server lines or from more than ten users simultaneously are a powerful thing.

Some variants of nukes use floods of data, and if done with enough force like through a T3 line (much faster than ISDN) can crash your system in an instant.

If you don't already have some flood protection apart from the basic kind built into the IRC client software then you should either get some from a reliable script archive (try IRC Scripts) or try writing your own - its great to make your own scripts, very satisfying.