Today is

By: Ikedi Ani-okoye.

IRC Invention

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was invented in 1988. The colleges rapidly caught on and the word spread. Two of the oldest and largest IRC networks are DALnet and EFnet and are still operating today. They are networks of hundreds of servers all working together, with thousands of chat rooms and people.

Until recently, linking into IRC chat from a webpage was difficult. The software was rough and no one really put the time into it. Advances have been made, and now we can bring the world of IRC chat and webcams directly to you from web pages.

IRC and spamming

From IRC and chat rooms.Some IRC clients will give a user's email address to anyone who cares to ask it. Many spammers harvest email addresses from IRC, knowing that those are 'live' addresses and send spam to those email addresses.

This method is used beside the annoying IRC bots that send messages interactively to IRC and chat rooms without attempting to recognize who is participating in the first place.This is another major source of email addresses for spammers, especially as this is one of the first public activities newbie’s join, making it easy for spammers to harvest 'fresh' addresses of people who might have very little experience dealing with spam.

Exploiting IRC

The most common installation methods involve system or security exploitation, and unsuspecting users manually executing unknown programs. Distribution channels include email, malicious or hacked web pages, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), peer-to-peer networks, etc. Upon executing these files, your computer will be infected with a virus that causes various symptoms including multiple popups on your internet explorer tool bar. When you try to close the pop up tabs, every new window you open or site you surf activates the symptoms again.

CONCLUSION

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat of synchronous conferencing . It is mainly designed for group (many to many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one to one communication via private message and data transfers via Direct Client to Client.

IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in late August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser talk) on a BSS called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.