New Project: atkbot for IRC Takeovers

A little over a week ago I started working on a new project for fun in my freetime: atkbot.

“atkbot is a cross platform IRC bot written in Java, designed to takeover IRC channels.”

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been using IRC forever. IRC (if you aren’t aware) stands for internet relay chat. It’s a pretty old protocol for chatting (in text) with friends. Tons of people still use IRC today, and it is a popular way to communicate with people.

IRC bots are programs which simulate a person, and provide certain functionality to IRC users. Most IRC bots are trivia games, or chat room monitoring tools, but there are also takeover bots which try to take over chat rooms and remove users from them. And this is the goal of atkbot.

atkbot doesn’t make use of any exploits, or anything like that, it simply joins IRC channels, and waits to be given operator status. Once it is given operator status, it bans and kicks all users from the room, sends channel invites to the bot operators (specified in the bot config files), and then private messages them as well to let them know that the channel has been taken over.

atkbot is cross-platform (will run on anything with Java), and is going to be highly configurable. I’m currently cleaning up the development code, and plan on pushing a first release at some point this weekend. The configs are simple and straight forward (see the config file for information), and should be completely independent of any other system packages.

I decided to write atkbot for fun as a little side project to make me laugh a bit. Please don’t use it for anything truly evil :)

I’ll post some updates once the first version is released. If you have any suggestions or features that you think should be added, please let me know!