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Unfortunately, the past few days many EFnet servers (and more are following) have had to ban an entire ISP, which has not happened in over a decade, if not longer. Naturally, something extreme must happen for this to be even considered. [... and the extreme thing is ...] the email also contained sensitive information about who this operator was, including nicknames

This is ridiculous. Why would an IRC op want to keep his/her nickname from becoming public? On IRC, even IP addresses are public. Hetzners reaction seems entirely reasonable to me, especially if the server in question was "mots likely hacked".

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> Why would an IRC op want to keep his/her nickname from becoming public?

That isn't what they said.

> On IRC, even IP addresses are public.

This may still be true on efnet. It has ceased to be true on many IRC networks. And even where it is, VPNs, shell accounts, tor, and similar methods are readily available to make the IP address worthless.

> Hetzners reaction seems entirely reasonable to me

Please tell us where you work so we can all be certain never to report any sort of abuse to your employer non-anonymously.

> That isn't what they said.

How not? The forum seems to be down now but the announcement heavily implied that all that was "leaked" was the nick name of an operator, which they claimed could somehow be used to deduce the real name and address.

The problem is not the public knowledge of a nick, but the information that the person using that nick made the complaint. It paints a target on a person whose nick is very often publicly associated with a real identity.

Exactly. If efnet has problems with giving the names of their "operators" they should send such requests as "securitymanager@efnet" or whatever. Efnet can become the target (it is supposedly target anyway) but no real names in efnet must be "leaked" by email forwarding. If you don't "have the time" or common sense to protect yourself why do you expect more from others?

What do you think happens when an IRC op gets his name passed to that kiddie? Many IRCd gets hit with 50Gbit/s all the time because of kiddie targeting operators that make such decisions.

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