IRC takeover war

Takeover wars have plagued IRC networks for a long time. Due to a design flaw in the original protocol specs, if two servers lost the connection between each other, the channel operators on both sides of the split should retain their status. When one of the servers has no users in a channel during a split, people could join that channel, gain channel operator status - and when the servers merged, they could kick out the original operators.

As time has passed, various measures have been implemented to prevent takeovers in different kinds of IRC server software. This, however, has only led to other kinds of takeover attempts, such as cracking the computers of channel operators.