Forums General Discussion Question on using bouncers and security using IRC

Greetings everyone. This is my first time posting. I can fairly say that I am a novice in using IRC. I am starting to use it frequently to chat online for games and discussions. With me being a newbie being said, I have been getting a fair ammount of hack attempts and trojans (caught by my firewall/av thankfully) by browsing web pages in the past and am taking more security precautions now. I have heard that I should get a bouncer to hide/change my local host and cable modem IP address so that other people can see it since I found out that my local host stated the very city that I live in.

I have learned to use proxie programs (GhostSurf, Anonymizer) to surf web pages with a cloaked IP. But in IRC, I am an utter newbie.

I have searched in Google for ways to hide/change my IP and local host. Some of the IRC servers I want to frequent doesn't mask my IP or local host and the very city I live in is right there for them to see!

I am using the latest version of mIRC currently as my IRC program. My OS is Windows XP 64-bit.

I have downloaded and tried using various bouncer programs from the web, including proBNC v2.6 from http://eric.pantera.free.fr/index2.html
and have started it, but I'm stuck on which IP mask address to add. If anybody is familiar with this program, is there a list of available IP's to use somewhere? It doesn't say much help on the site.

Are there any other easier/better to use bouncer programs out there? I don't mind if it isn't free, keeping my local host info safe and hidden is something I am willing pay for.

I have also wanted to try this bouncer from http://gotbnc.com and it's download link is this-
http://gotbnc.com/files/bnc2.9.4.tar.gz

The question is, what kind of format is tar.gz ? I don't know which web programs to open it. Do I download it via mIRC? I haven't downloaded anything from IRC before so if so, I'll try and find the command. But does anybody know how to make this work? I would really appreciate it.

By the way, I know there is a helpful user named Watchdog here and if you're reading this, it may be my first post here but I wanna tell you that I've been reading some of your post and tried to PM you about this, but your PM feature is turned off so if you're reading this, I would really appreciate it if you can help. Any help from anyone here would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

I have found the folling info from another site during my research on Google on using bouncers. I am just stuck on the downloading/installing the bnc from http://gotbnc.com/ because I don't know how to work with the tar.gz format

[quote][ anonymity on irc ]
A BNC, or a Bouncer - is used in conjunction with IRC as a way of hiding your host when people /whois you. On most IRC networks, your host isnt masked when you whois, meaning the entire IP appears, like 194.2.0.21, which can be resolved. On other networks, your host might be masked, like IRCnetwork-0.1 but it can still give valuable information, like nationality if your host is not a IP, but a DNS resolved host, like my.host.cn would be masked to IRCnetwork-host.cn but this would still tell the person who whoised you, that you are from China.

To keep information such as this hidden from the other users on an IRC network, many people use a Bouncer, which is actually just a Proxy. Let us first draw a schematic of how a normal connection would look, with and without a BNC installed.

Without a BNC:

your.host.cn <<-->> irc.box.sk

With a BNC:

your.host.cn <<-->> my.shell.com <<-->> irc.box.sk

You will notice the difference between the two. When you have a BNC installed, a shell functions as a link between you and the IRC server (irc.box.sk as an example). You install a BNC on a shell, and set a port for it to listen for connections on. You then login to the shell with your IRC client, BitchX/Xchat/mIRC, and then it will login to the IRC server you specify - irc.box.sk in this case. In affect, this changes your host, in that it is my.shell.com that makes all the requests to irc.box.sk, and irc.box.sk doesn't know of your.host.cn, it has never even made contact with it.

In that way, depending on what host your shell has, you can login to IRC with a host like i.rule.com, these vhosts are then actually just an alias for your own machine, your.host.cn, and it is all completely transparent to the IRC server.

Many servers have sock bots that check for socket connections. These aren't BNC connections, and BNC cannot be tested using a simple bot, unless your shell has a socket port open (normally 1080) it will let you in with no problem at all, the shell is not acting as a proxy like you would expect, but more as a simple IRC proxy, or an IRC router. In one way, the BNC just changes the packet and sends it on, like:

to: my.shell.com -> to: irc.box.sk -> to: my.shell.com from: your.host.cn <- from: my.shell.com <- from: irc.box.sk

The BNC simply swaps the host of your packet, saying it comes from my.shell.com. But also be aware, that your own machine is perfectly aware that it has a connection established with my.shell.com, and that YOU know that you are connected to irc.box.sk. Some BNCs are used in IRC networks, to simulate one host. If you had a global IRC network, all linked together, you could have a local server called: cn.myircnetwork.com which Chinese users would log into. It would then Bounce them to the actual network server, in effect making all users from china have the same host - cn.myircnetwork.com, masking their hosts. Of course, you could change the host too - so it didn't reveal the nationality, but it is a nice gesture of some networks, that they mask all hosts from everyone, but it makes life hard for IRCops on the network - but its a small price to pay for privacy.

Note: Even if you do use IRC bouncer, within DCC transfers or chat, your IP will be revealed, because DCC requires direct IP to IP connection. Usual mistake of IRC user is to have DCC auto-reply turned on. For an attacker is then easy to DCC chat you or offer you a file, and when IRC clients are connected, he can find out your IP address in the list of his TCP/IP connections (netstat).

How do I get IRC bouncer?

you download and install bouncer software, or get someone to install it for you (probably the most known and best bouncer available is BNC, homepage : http://gotbnc.com/)
you configure and start the software - in case it's bouncer at Unix machine, you start it on your shell account (let's say shell.somewhere.com)
you open IRC and connect to the bouncer at shell.somewhere.com on the port you told it to start on.
all depending on the setup, you may have to tell it your password and tell it where to connect, and you're now on irc as shell.somewhere.com instead of your regular hostname

Source- http://www.governmentsecurity.org/articles/AnonymitycompleteGUIDE.php

Wow, that was a long post!

I'm not too sure about all of that, but .tar.gz is usually used for Linux programs, so you might have downloaded one by accident.

Thank you, I use Windows XP 64-bit for my operating system. I don't know a thing about Linux. Maybe I should have looked for Windows version of those files like .exe?

Anyhow, do you think if paying $5 a month and getting a shell account from a site http://strategical.net/ would help? I'm willing to pay the money, it's not much compared to the damage due to reformatting from virus and hackers that happened in the past. Again, I dunno much about this. If anybody has more experience in hiding or changing their IP and host on IRC, I would really appreciate the feedback. Any help is welcome.