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Hitler and Cloud Computing Security

For shits and giggles, I wondered how hard it would be to use Telnet to connect to IRC. One reason this is useful, is when you are at a location using a machine with no irc client and cant install or download one. Why you can’t depends on the network you are using, but lets say you are at work or the library, you shouldn’t be aloud to install software on their machines, but if they have telnet (which they should) then you can just use that to chat online.

Warning: Telnet is sent in the clear. There is no secure communications. Some IRC clients support SSL and TLS for encryption, but you are not going to have that option from using telnet, so be sure whatever you do, you don’t send sensitive information over the wire.

(These commands would pretty much be the same in Linux/OSX terminals.)

Now, first thing you need to do is open the cmd window. Then type “telnet irc.somehost.com 6667″ (without quotes) where irc.comehost.com is the irc server you want to connect to. Once you connect, you will see a normal ident or id scan. Now, choose a nickname for yourself. Enter “NICK myname” where myname is the nick you want to use. Next, you have to authenticate, or supply user info to the server. Until you do, you will get errors saying Not Registered or something to that effect.

Type in “USER mynick 8 * : My Name”
This should then tell the server who your NICK belongs to, and allow you to then send commands to the server. Once done, you can do all the normal IRC commands with one caveat. No slash commands like you would do in a channel, for instance, “/join #channel” is just “JOIN #channel”, /list is LIST, etc.

To chat in a channel, you have to format your messages in a certain manner. They are “PRIVMSG #channelname :this is your message”. All chats to a channel must start with “PRIVMSG #channelname :” After the colon is where you type your message.

To quit IRC, just type QUIT, or “QUIT :message on exit” where message on exit is what you want to say while leaving.

Staying in the session is a bit of a pain. One thing you need to do is either ping the server every few minutes to tell it you are still a live or pong the server when it tries to ping you. If you see something like “ping :irc.servername.com” and you get enough of them without responding with “pong :irc.servername.com”, you will get disconnected with a ping timeout. All IRC clients today do this for you automatically. I’m not sure if there is a way to script this directly into your session, sort of like an IRC bot to keep you alive, but I imagine you probably wont be using Telnet as your main client too often anyway, since its really limited to just chat for the most part. Now, if you have an IRC bot, you can fully control it via telnet though, but you cant do file transfers from within the windows telnet cmd window. Im not sure how that works in something like Hyper terminal or even on linux/mac, but if you have any knowledge of using telnet on those systems for IRC, I’d like to hear about it. For me, this was just a fun exercise in using telnet to chat on IRC. I imagine back in the day, this was the only way, and for that in itself, shows how far we have come. Everything from file sharing to network control, DoS attacks, etc, are all done on modern IRC systems through capable IRC clients.

Something that was meant for communication at the most basic fundamental level, is widely used for hacking with botnets (and has been for many years). I just find it interesting, even if its arcane via telnet, to see how things really work under the hood.