Yahoo: IRC on the Increase for File Sharing

[wiggum]

Internet Security Systems, which monitors networks around the world from seven points of presence, including a "war room" in Atlanta, has seen an increase in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) traffic in the last month, according to Grant Slender, principal ISS consultant for Australasia. The traffic surge relates to an increase in the use of IRC bots by the file-sharing community to swap files and pirated software across the Internet.

The Article then goes on about hackers and IRC.

[Ghost 23]

Irc is phat for dling anything but there is so many maicious users on there that it can get annoying surfing through there next work. BUt I its definitly better than any p2p software that I use except maybe winmx.

[Sephiroth]

IRC bots? I dont know of any P2P programs other than gnucleus with its IRC host cache which even that isnt a bot.. Alot just use IRC for just chat.

The Bots are a real pain in the ass though. All the ones ive seen were advertasing porno except one was scamming people with a fake virus message and telling people to download a mysterous zip file...

[Morgwen]

Originally posted by Sephiroth
The Bots are a real pain in the ass though. All the ones ive seen were advertasing porno except one was scamming people with a fake virus message and telling people to download a mysterous zip file...

Which channels do you visit? All bots I have seen are only a security protection for the founder.

Morgwen

[InspectorGadget]

lol they're referring to the bots that channels use for servers.... xdcc ring a bell? if you're not familiar with them the majority of them are either university or corporate lan 10/100mbit connections that ppl have managed to get control of and they use these bots as file servers for obvious advantages in raw bandwidth

[BloodySabbath]

Yeah, the bots Sephiroth and Morgwen are familiar with are simple spam bots or protection bots (a la ChanServ) - the bots the article is talking about are XDCC bots which allow for people to transfer files. Gte a list of channels on any of the major networks and you'll find dozens of warez channels with 100+ users each.