Largest IRC Network Has Been Compromised

Popular Internet relay chat network Freenode is asking users to change passwords after discovering its servers have been breached.

"The freenode infra team noticed an anomaly on a single IRC server. We have since identified that this was indicative of the server being compromised by an unknown third party," Freenode officials said in a statement.

The organization immediately began investigating the extent of the problem and located similar issues on other machines.

"Since traffic may have been sniffed, you may also wish to consider any channel keys or similar secret information exchanged over the network," officials said.  

Freenode facilitates open-source software projects and claims to have about 80,000 users.