IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Researchers of the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) achieved a stunning – and at the same time scary – 76,1% click rate on possibly malicious links in conversations that took place on IRC using an automated social-engineering software dubbed “HoneyBot”.

Their new approach to automated social engineering (“ASE”) does not rely on artificial conversations from an AI but instead used the bot to relay messages between humans, effectively avoiding detection according to what is commonly referred to as “Turing Test” in which humans assess if they can tell apart that they are talking to a human or a computer program of sorts. Previous generations of such bots used an AI called “Artificial Intelligence Markup” to engage in conversations with a much lower success rate: Users where able to spot 80% of the bots after exchanging only 3 messages with them.

Those who closely follow either projects development will have noticed a few “odd” looking commits to their sourcecode in the past few days.

The commits all concerned InspIRCds m_invisible module which provides similar functionality as the old mode +I in UnrealIRCd 3.1.x.

Quoting the InspIRCd wiki page about m_invisible the module

adds support for quiet (invisible) opers. A quiet oper is invisible to normal users on channels. This can be used for surveillence of botnet channels, statistics bots, etc. Note that other opers CAN see invisible opers; +Q only hides the oper from non-opers.

On networks that don’t hide your IP or hostname automatically on connect, your IP is exposed for everyone to see and possibly abuse.

Also there are many reasons you might not want to show everyone from what point of the world you are connecting from and/or want to add a little more anonymonity to your online activities.

You can do so by connecting to IRC via TOR – dubbed “The Onion Router” – how exactly that works and is set up is shown in a small tutorial video we’ve put online.

So you want to have a bouncer to stay connected on your favourite IRC network, hide your IP from hackers and the likes and all that without paying a single cent? Look no further, below we have gathered a few providers of such free BNCs and put them to a test – of course without them knowing

Note that we’ve only tested providers that require no sign-up for dubious services and provide bouncers which are free to use on any network and not only on the one where they have their support-channel – some however ask you to idle there and might cancel your BNC if they find you to not comply with this.