Luis Corrons, technical director of Panda Labs, said during its investigation of Anonymous' attacks its analysts got talking to some of the activists via Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

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All four of the men, who were arrested in December 2010 and January 2011, were already on bail and banned from accessing Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks, a popular channel for communicating among supporters of Anonymous, a nebulous collective of web activists and pranksters.

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In a supplemental appendix, the USSS cited the increasing diversity of the criminal underground, with bad actors clustering around Internet Relay Channels (IRC), Internet-based chat rooms, or Web-based forums.

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