[Asmo]

A plea for free security software for Windows

Thursday, November 27 2003 by Asmo

From time to time I'd like to make a persona plea for the use of proper (and updated!) security software.

Especially lately there seems to be a boom in drone/bot connections to IRC servers again. Most of these connections are caused by compromised machines from customers who failed to secure their Windows machines properly.

Sure you apply your Windows patches in a timely manner and are updating your antivirus program at least once a week with the latest definitions as well? And without doubt you are using a firewall to close access to and from your box for connections you rather don't want. Like for example a Trojan which despite AV-software still got installed, so the firewall would cut access to the Internet off, so the Trojan's effectiveness would still be reduced heavily.

Good thing is good antivirus software and firewall software does not have to cost anything! So here once more a list of software you can download and install for free!

Free Anti Virus Software
- AntiVir Personal Edition is a AV product that will monitor all your downloads, macrovirusses etc, and has a easy to use download manager to keep it up to date with the latest virus definitions.
- AVG Anti-Virus needs little introduction. This software already earned its gold medal as being a very reliable free antivirus solution.

Free Firewall Software
- ZoneAlarm has to be the most well known free firewall solution on this planet. And without doubt the most used as well. For security n00bs it is probably the easiest to use and operate firewall. If they could just do something about those overly paranoid 'alerts'...
- Sygate Personal Firewall is a good choice for those who want a little more control. If you are familiar with terms like ports, MAC addresses and protocols this will be the choice for you.

As Internet security and DDoS, drones and floodbots on IRC are not restricted to IRC users alone it will be necessary for the people who know to help those who don't. Running a firewall or antivirus software does not have to be a hassle once it is setup correctly. Maybe you can help your friends and family installing them?

Irchiver, IRC search engine or commercial product?

Friday, November 14 2003 by Asmo

After the recent events where IRC users noticed Google bots monitoring their chat, another similar project has came to the attention of IRCJunkie.
Although this time there might be a bit more to the reason behind the bots then feeding a new search engine alone.

On the 30th of October CoSCo, part of Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), loaded a small army of bots on the Freenode.net IRC network and started logging the chat from practically all channels on the network there without asking permission to the users inside the channels.

"We launched the bots practically to every channel on Freenode almost at the same time", Ville H. Tuulos of CoSCo explained to IRCJunkie. "After about 10 minutes of action, we got k-lined. Naturally our large scale effort didn't remain unnoticed and it might have seemed being hostile to many who know pests of IRC, clones, floodbots etc."

In a follow up email we asked Mr. Tuulos if he found it ethical that chats were being logged and used outside the channel without the users being explicitly told before doing so. We have not received an answer to this question.

A discussion between Freenode and CoSCo started after which CoSCo opened a FAQ section on their website explaining the reason of their bot logging chat on IRC, which you can find on a /WHOIS on the bot, and the K:Line was eventually lifted. The FAQ and website explain the logs are being used for scientific and academic research. As the FAQ says: "Our main effort is to develop a full-fledged open source Web search engine, including the crawlers."

If you will further browse the website of CoSCo you can eventually find a page about a "Search-Ina-Box" project. Quote from the page: "Search-Ina-Box is an open source, plug-and-play server that will provide power search and content-based targeted advertising facilities to intranets and their mobile community."

"Content-based targeted advertising facilities", could this mean IRC chat is being analyzed and used to produce "content based targeted adverts"? We asked Mr. Tuulos if there is a connection between the bots logging IRC chats, and the Search-Ina-Box project. "Both Search-Ina-Box and Irchiver are based on the same statistical models and language processing. This is the science part", he replied. Science and commerce seems to go hand in hand sometimes.

As a follow up question we asked Mr. Tuulos if users can make up a good decision to let the bots log their chat or not based on the information on the Irchiver page and FAQ alone. This question was left unanswered.

"We are doing hard science as can be seen from our publication list, but we don't want to be just academic nichés. We've seen that all the science is best to evaluate in the real world. That's why we have SIB and Irchiver."

CoSCo says the project will be released as
opensource, probally under the GPL license when finished. This of
course raises concern what others will do with this source. "We launched the bots practically to every channel on Freenode almost at the same time", Ville H. Tuulos said to IRCJunkie. Potentially script kiddies could "borrow" this code to create bot nets that mass join channels and negatively affect an IRC network this way.

We asked if CoSCo was interested in connecting the bots to other networks as well. "We did test our bots shortly on IRCNet, but we didn't collect any data. We asked QuakeNet administration about their willingness to help us in our effort, but the problem seems to be their strict connection limits" Mr. Tuulos replied. "We would be happy to cooperate with any interested IRC networks."

The host being used by the Irchive bots is irchive.it.hiit.fi.

Update: A discussion on this matter between Mr. Tuulos and users (one being me, Asmo) is active on SearchIRC's forum.

Older news

Thursday, November 13 2003 by Asmo

Due to a server move we have some minor problems with a period in 2003. The articles however are still to be found on the archive page in case you need them.
_________________
Asmo

webmaster www.IRC-Junkie.org