I thought this as well. "My virus needs to log into my irc channel" is most likely a weak password situation. If someone is analyzing the binary code of this virus, the game is over anyways. No matter how strong your password is, the program needs to be able to decrypt it to use it and so it might as well be plaintext and weak.
You might be surprised that they often not only use a weak password in that case, but also use a weak password for their IRC sysop account. And in some cases it is the exact same password. :)
