Internet Relay Chat Forensics

Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is a protocol that allows users that connect to Internet Relay Chat Servers to have conversation with others in real time. Users connect to IRC Servers using an IRC Client. Commercial chat client�s like yahoo! and google chat are quite popular in wide use. To other chat clients were worth exploring. These tools are arguably better suited for criminal activity. IRC is one such tool. There are basically two options available to investigators involved in an IRC occurrence. They can look at log files on servers or clients or they can monitor transmission directly. In this paper we have been using X Chat application for the IRC Forensic Investigation. We capture the IRC Client�s packets and analyze that packets.