Last month, the online hacktivist group, Anonymous announced a new chat service called OnionIRC specifically dedicated to teach its new members the skills of hacking, coding and encryption. Many of our readers asked as about ways to join Anonymous and learn about hacktivism. If you are interested in hacktivism and want to learn more about it, OnionIRC is the best option. This chat service is an internet relay chat forum that allows users to remain anonymous through encrypted communications over the Tor network. From the time the service has been launched, the group has been teaching classes on all kinds of subjects, such as how to use tools like nmap and bash to the tricks of OSINT (open-source intelligence). Many of these courses (chat logs) are available online, on the @OnionIRC Twitter account. However, their teaching does not stop at this. The teachers and the people responsible for this campaign are concentrating more on endorsing the principles of hacktivism other than anything else. As a result, the classes include the ideas of Anonymous itself, hacktivism in general, and civil disobedience. The OnionIRC is not your regular Anonymous IRC. While this is certainly not the place where the group plans its ops, but it is definitely the place where the next cohort of hacktivists are employed and trained.
How to connect to the OnionIRC
A step-by-step tutorial on how to connect to the OnionIRC using your Tor Browser and the HexChat IRC client is below: Step 1: Download Tor Browser and HexChat. You can download them from Softpedia mirrors, or from their homepages. Step 2: Open HexChat and click ADD. A screenshot of the appropriate settings is available below.
For the first visit, you can leave those fields blank in the Login Method section. However, ensure to register an identity after you connect to the IRC for the first time. The remaining information that you need to remember is the OnionIRC URL and port, which are: onionirchubx5363.onion/6667 Step 3: Open the Tor Browser. For all the time that you are on the OnionIRC, keep it open. In HexChat’s Settings option, go to Network, and then to Network Setup. Here, you need to setup a proxy server with the information from the image below. Remember that these settings will be removed, every time you close the Tor Browser. Hence, you will have to re-do them all over again. There you are, its done. You can now connect to the OnionIRC.
