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IRC Botnets Are Not Quite Dead Yet
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RetiredUser
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RetiredUser,
 User Rank: Ninja
4/30/2015 | 5:33:13 PM
IRC Bot or Clever Geek?
The most dangerous of the IRC bots are those that have been in place for years and as far as anyone knows are some clever geek (or jerk) haunting the IRC channels.

I recall being on an OpenVMS channel for a long time and exchanging some words with a guy who I thought just had bad English. I should talk since I use Google Translate constantly to talk to people who must cringe when they seem my messages fly by :-)

Long story short, turns out the geek was a bot; I was less careful back then and could basically have been owned by whomever placed the IRC bot there since I was completely convinced it was a person.

While I tend to stick to Freenode these days, I used to connect to dozens of servers, hundreds of channels. IRC is alive and well, but as noted by Joe here, lots of people don't really think about IRC anymore (like BBS) and in a way, neither do we - the regular users - since it's about as comfortable as a desk phone and the feeling of picking up the receiver after hearing a ring.

Yeah, we need to get less comfortable and more alert, for both our sake and that of our fellow IRCers.
Joe Stanganelli
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Joe Stanganelli,
 User Rank: Ninja
4/29/2015 | 11:53:40 PM
IRC
Of course, not a lot of people think about IRC anymore...except the techies, hackers, and people active in certain communities (like reddit and 4chan).  Thanks for this important reminder that, as IRC still proliferates, so too do IRC vulnerabilities.


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