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nferring and Visualizing Social Networks on IRC screenshot PieSpy is an IRC bot that monitors a set of IRC channels. It uses a simple set of heuristics to infer relationships between pairs of users. These inferrences allow PieSpy to build a mathematical model of a social network for any channel. These social networks can be drawn and used to create animations of evolving social networks. PieSpy has also been used to visualize Shakespearean social networks. This page got slashdotted on 11 March 2004, with the site getting 250,000 hits per hour. Thanks to Notnet for making sure it all stayed alive! PieSpy was presented at the Information Visualization conference (IV'04) in July 2004. Read the full paper online. It has also appeared in Computer Weekly, c't magazine, and I was interviewed live on BBC Radio Kent.

Discovered on May/08/03, Fizzer (a.k.a. W32/Fizzer@MM, W32/Fizzer.A, and Worm/Fizzu.A worm) spreads via email and the KaZaA P2P network. According to antivirus vendor F-Secure, Fizzer contains a built-in IRC backdoor, a DoS (Denial of Service) attack tool, a data stealing trojan, an HTTP server and autoupdating capabilities. The worm also has the ability to disable certain antivirus programs.