Whois-talk-IRC

We continue from where we left last time and see internet services whois ,talk and IRC.

Whois is a program run by InterNIC that will tell you the owner of any second-level domain name. For example, you can look up the name of the owner of your own access provider by entering for example, "process.com" and whois will tell you the owner of that second-level domain name. The InterNIC Web whois is at http://rs.internic.net/cgi-bin/whois.

whois can also be used to find out whether a domain name is available or has already been taken. If you enter a domain name you are considering and the search result is "No match," the domain name is likely to be available and you can apply to register it through your service provider.

The security risk with whois is that a hacker can look-up information about his/her target before striking. As a matter of fact, this information can be used for exploring security weaknesses in your system.

For instance, there is program on a Gopher server that will produce similar results as whois, but this one will tell you the names of all domain name holders associated with a specific second-level domain name. This program is at gopher://rs.internic.net/7waissrc%3A/rs/whois.src. At IBM, for example, you can lookup information about its employees by checking their whois service at http://whois.ibm.com. The same goes for Stanford University, which you can look-up information about their students.

Talk is a UNIX service that allows two users to communicate over the Internet via text-based terminals. It's much similar to the Net send command and IRC, only that the connection is directed by the persons e-mail address. Thus, if you were to talk to me via the Internet you would issue a command:

By issuing this command the local talk program would contact the remote talk daemon. If I'm available, assuming that I have talk connections enabled, my screen would split and conversation would take place. If you're familiar with the chat command of Windows for Workgroups, bundled with the network tools, you know what I'm talking about.

The risk with this service is that information can be gathered from an unadvertised user that engage in conversation with someone unknown out on the Internet.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC), just like talk, allows the communication over the Internet. However, IRC allows multiple users conversing at the same time.

The main risk is that file transferring can be done over IRC without any traced left behind, its like a cash transaction without receipts! Even though these file transferring can be done through FTP, etc., IRC makes it possible

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