p2pnet.net News Feature:- Where, possibly, did the pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utils that turned up on a home-burned CD-ROM start out?

What about some of the e-virii and DoS attacks originate.

And where you are likely to find your ‘elite-level’ pirates?

On IRC.

Now read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Pirates and Hackers Roam in the Internet’s Wild West
By Seth Schiesel – TechNewsWorld

It was just another Wednesday on the sprawling Internet chat room network called IRC. In a room called Prime-Tyme-Movies, users offered free pirated downloads of The Passion of the Christ and Kill Bill Vol. 2. In the DDO-Matrix channel, illegal copies of Microsoft’s Windows and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, an Xbox game, were ripe for downloading. In other chat rooms, whole albums of free MP3s were hawked with blaring capital letters.

And in a far less obtrusive channel, an anonymous user may well have been checking his progress of hacking into the computers of unsuspecting Internet surfers.

Even as much of the Internet has come to resemble a pleasant, well-policed suburb, a little-known neighborhood known as Internet Relay Chat remains the Wild West. While copyright holders and law enforcement agencies take aim at their adversaries on Web sites and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, IRC remains the place where people with something to hide go to do business.

Probably no more than 500,000 people are using IRC worldwide at any time, and many of them are engaged in legitimate activities, network administrators say. Yet that pirated copy of Microsoft Office or Norton Utilities that turns up on a home-burned CD-ROM may well have originated on IRC. And the Internet viruses and denial of service attacks that periodically make news generally get their start there, too.

This week, the network’s chat rooms were abuzz with what seemed like informed talk about the Sasser worm, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers over the weekend.

IRC is where you are going to find your ‘elite-level’ pirates, said John Wolfe, director for enforcement at the Business Software Alliance, a trade group that fights software piracy.

If they were only associating with each other and inbreeding, maybe we could coexist alongside them. But it doesn’t work that way. What they’re doing on IRC has a way of permeating into mainstream piracy.

Shutting Down Software Vaults
Two weeks ago, law enforcement agencies in 11 countries announced an operation called Fastlink, aimed at shutting down the activities of almost 100 people suspected of helping to operate illegal software vaults on the Internet.

The pirated copies of music, films, games and other software were generally distributed using a separate Internet file-transfer system, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said, but the pirates themselves generally used IRC to communicate and coordinate with one another.

The groups targeted as part of Fastlink are alleged to have used IRC to have committed their crimes, like almost all other warez groups, said Michael Kulstad, the department spokesman. Warez, pronounced like wares, is techie slang for illegally copied software.

When IRC started in the 1980s, it was best known as a way for serious computer professionals worldwide to communicate in real time. It is still possible though sometimes a bit difficult to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands of IRC chat rooms, known as channels, operating at any one time. There are also respectable IRC systems and channels, some operated by universities or Internet service providers, for gamers seeking opponents or those who want to talk about sports and hobbies.

IRC Much Like Star Wars Cantina
Still, IRC perhaps most closely resembles the cantina scene in Star Wars a shadowy hangout of digital smugglers, pirates, curiosity seekers and the people who love them (or hunt them). There seem to be IRC channels dedicated to every sexual fetish, and IRC users speculate that terrorists also use the networks to communicate in relative obscurity.

Yet IRC has its advocates, who point to its legitimate uses.

IRC is where all of the kids come on and go nuts, said William Bierman, a college student in Hawaii who helps develop IRC server software. All of the attention IRC has gotten over the years has been because it’s a haven for criminals, which is a very one-sided view.

The whole idea behind IRC is freedom of speech, Bierman said.

It takes only some basic technical know-how to run an IRC server. Because it is generally a text-only medium, it does not require high- capacity Internet connections, making it relatively easy to run a private IRC server from home.

Some Internet experts believe that child pornography rings sometimes use their own private, password-protected IRC servers. Particularly wary users can try to hide their identity by logging in to IRC servers only through intermediary computers.

Running IRC
It is also relatively simple for users to take part in IRC. First, the user downloads an IRC client program (as Internet Explorer is a Web client program and Eudora is an e-mail client program). There are a number of IRC clients available, but perhaps the most popular is a Windows-compatible shareware program known as mIRC (www.mirc.com).

When users run the IRC program, they can choose among dozens of public networks. Within a given network, it does not really matter which individual server one uses. Alternately, if users know the Internet address of a private server, they can type in that address.

Once logged in to a public server, the user can generate a list of thousands of available channels. On an unmoderated network, the most popular channels are often dedicated to trading music, films and software.

That is because in addition to supporting text-only chat rooms, IRC allows a user to send a file directly to another user without clogging the main server.

That capability has a lot of legitimate uses for transferring big files that would be rejected by an e-mail system. Want to send your brother a copy of your home movie without burning a disc and putting it in the mail? The file-transfer capability in IRC may be the most convenient way.

Many Uses
Naturally, that file-transfer capability also has many less legitimate uses. Advanced IRC pirates automate the distribution of illegally copied material so that when a user sends a private message, the requested file is sent automatically. It is fairly common on IRC for such a system to send out hundreds or even thousands of copies of the same file (like a music album or a pirated copy of Windows) over a few weeks.

But perhaps the most disruptive use of IRC is as a haven and communications medium for those who release viruses or try to disable Web sites and other Internet servers.

Hackers scan through millions of possible Internet addresses looking for those unprotected computers and then use them to initiate coordinated denial of service attacks, which flood the target (say, a Web site) with thousands or millions of spurious requests. In all of the noise, legitimate users find the target site unavailable.

10,000 Hacked Machines
It’s amazing how many machines at home are hacked or have been exploited in some way, said Chris Behrens, an IRC software developer in Arizona. We have seen 10,000 hacked machines connect to IRC at one time, and they all go park themselves in a channel somewhere so someone can come along and tell them who to attack.

Bierman and other IRC administrators said they were reluctant to confront hackers, not only because of their free-speech concerns but also because angry hackers often turn their drones against IRC servers themselves.

Rob Mosher, who runs a server in the EFNet network, echoed other IRC administrators in saying that attempts to regulate the shady dealings online were doomed to failure.

Look, if we find one channel and close it, they move to another, Mosher said. It’s been like this for years. You can’t really stop it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2004 at 12:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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