How much can Network Administrators see?
reddit / irc

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[deleted] · 2018-05-08 04:01

[deleted]

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phate408 · 2018-05-08 04:46

They can absolutely see the names of all channels, and the topics set
on those. If there is a services bot, or other "network" entity in a
channel, it would be a fairly trivial task to see the text in that
channel with a module on services, detailed logging, or a local packet
capture between the IRC daemon and the services daemon. There exists a
module (for Unreal at least) to relay PM traffic, but it could also be
done via packet capture if either party isn't using SSL or if the data
crosses a non-SSL server link. And really, a motivated party could
fairly easily modify any IRC daemon to dump PMs to file or something.

Like most services, if you don't control it, don't assume your data is
private.

DCC Chat would bypass the server for the actual communication, so that
would be a fairly safe communication channel, and even better if it
was encrypted. For non-DCC, and for chat with multiple people, there
are encryption plugins you can get for some clients, so that as far as
the server sees, your PMs and channel messages are just encrypted
strings. Still, if that's a concern, unless IRC is a must, I'd be
tempted to look at an encrypted messenger of some form like WhatsApp,
Telegram, Signal, or the like.

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[deleted] · 2018-05-08 06:02

[deleted]