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 kind of takeover attempts, such as cracking the computer of one of the channel operators.