How-to Secure Your mIRC Client
People tend to avoid the integrated relay chat (IRC) as a means of communication primarily because of two things. Most of the irc clients are not user friendly and they lack strong security against known security issues. It is a fact that IRC clients are susceptible to the wide spread of worms, viruses & trojans since the early days of the internet. However, things didn’t change since then, more and more computers had been victimized due to poor irc precautions being made. The least we can do to stay out of harms way is by properly configuring our irc client to withstand those destructive codes from infecting our computers.
For this guide i’m going to use the popular mIRC client.
Open miRC then go to Tools. Select Options... or press the shortcut key Alt+O.
Enable Flood Protection
Tick the Enable flood protection. The default settings should work on most users. (see the screenshot)
Disable DCC
I strong advise users to disable DCC if they intend to use mIRC for chatting purposes only.
On Send request:
Tick Ignore all
On Chat request:
Tick Ignore all
However, if you’d like to use the DCC feature, you should do the ff precautions.
1. You MUST not set the On Send request and On Chat request to Auto-get.
2. Set if file exists to Ask or if you can’t avoid to use the Auto-get file. However, you should at least assign nicknames of trusted chatters using the Trusted button.
3. Change the default DCC get folders (download folder) from the default path which is C:\Program Files\mIRC\download to C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Desktop. This way you can easiy monitor what files you are receiving.
4. Make sure you set the following file types to ignore. You can delete the specific file type if you are expecting a legit file from a friend or from someone you trust.
*.bat *.com *.dll *.exe *.htm *.html *.ini *.js *.lnk *.mrc *.pif *.pl *.scr *.shs *.vbs *.wmf
Set Lock for strong security:
1. Disable Send and Get
2. Disable all commands - Com, Decode, Dll, Run (You won’t be needing this if you are not running any mIRC scripts.)
Hereafter we can say that your mIRC is more secured. Enjoy chatting!
