IP Address tracking

Can some track your exact location via your IP address? And if so, how?

 

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The only possible way is if your ISP made their IP lease records publicly available. Since none of the ISPs that know of do, it is very rare that any Joe Shmoe can find out your exact location by simply knowing your IP. The most acurate your IP can be traced to is your ISP, which in a lot of cases is the same general location in which you live (to the city).

 

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In fact you can know the last router's location (in general) so if you're using your work computer... However, I don't know how it's configured on the routers. Is it a kind of "Router.Info" file or something like that ?

 

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Why are you asking this?

 

Who are you talking too ?
:bugeye:

 

wesmorrisbabe

 

I was just wondering, mainly as a matter of protection. Hollywood (like "The Net", and "The Matrix") make it seem very possible for someone's exact location to be pin-pointed via the internet but I was just curious if finding someone via their IP address is really that simple. I've been kind of thinking ahead, too, towards protecting our children from the potential dangers of the internet. I am sure there are plenty of good sites for this but if anyone knows of a really good one, to narrow our search, and could recommend it to us, I would appreciate it. Thanks!

 

Generaly they can track you back to your ISP, and find out where that is located, but they can't track you to your own home (um unless you've set up your own ISP heh). They COULD however track you through your ISP, but they'd probably have to make some phone calls and get the address from your billing info, but I don't know of any ISP that would do this unless you were under investigation for fraud, or kiddy porn or something. But then again there are ISPs run by 5 college guys in the basement of a house they are renting, and who knows what information they'd be willing to give out about their customers, right?

 

There are ways of obtaining details.

One method currently used for Traces, is Trigonometry where you triangulate how long pings take to reach the IP in questions from different servers.

This can be useful, but occasionally can be frauded (When you come up against devious types that use specific methods to Lengthen time delay's)

Some information is available from your ISP, but not necessarily all. (Afterall most countries have a practice of making sure such business protect their Clientel databases.)

If someone truly wanted to aquire details on who you are, and where you are, my overall guess is that planting a trojan on someones system would allow you to get this information. (Although "kids", I'm not telling you to go out and do this sort of stuff, as in some countries this type of crime is punishable by DEATH.)

 

Well, I'm glad to know it's not as easy as it seems. Thanks so much your your help. You've made me feel a lot better.

 

I suggest a program -Visual Route- for this task
nice and easy and user

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friendly

 

Just curious, how would this kind of thing work? I mean I know how a trojan works and all, but how would it help to find your location? Does your computer even technicaly know where it is? What information could they look up for that?

 

You real name, credit card numbers, even your email address (the one that your ISP gives you) can all be used to find your street address. So if any of those are stored on your computer then...well...there you go.

Still, this just takes a traceroute and figures out the location of the ISP. I tested this program out for both Telus and Shaw (two popular ISPs in western Canada) and both times the program pointed to Toronto. This clearly can't be all that accurate.

 

Testify you missed one other method, and it will explain it to Mystech.

Dialup.

All someone needs to do is get the machine they infect to "Dialup" either their home or a third party location (like one of those voicemail boxes that has been compromised), they can then get the phone number of the caller (Caller ID).

That then tallied with certain portions of software that contains address could give you an exact match to the persons location.

 

In theory, yes, this is a possibility. In practice, this will only work when your ping is heading for a computer where bandwidth use is not much of a problem. If i'm pinging yahoo, it is rather consistent at 110 m/s. If i'm pinging someone connected with a dialup, uploading and downloading irregulary, i could have pings ranging from say 100 to 400ms in one minute. You could take an average out of it, but i doubt if it would be accurate enough.

 

The easiest way to locate someone's "real" location from the net is the shit that they put out themselves.

Bios, for example, on forums, web sites, online contests.

Many people are quick to post their real names, email addresses etc on many different occasions.

A lot of these places will make information readily available.

After that, it is as simple as using search engines, info engines (like bigfoot and 411), DMV records (you'd be amazed what is available online in some states), AOL community boards, all the places people often post their info, then compiling the data.

It is not as technical and fancy as "Hackers" it is more like an old fashioned Private Dick looking for common links on available data sources.

If you are not careful (which most people are not careful enough) it is not very hard.

 

~Mwahpff~ Fancy Hackers ~Snickers~

I'll have to explain myself, I left out the normal "Social Engineering" stuff because someone had already mentioned it (and there never is any point to repeat something that has already been said)

My Snickering over "Fancy Hackers" is based on Skip diving, thats real fancy.

Its true a whole lot of data could be dug up and mined, getting a phone number means "Phreaking" the person, and thus potentially getting more data. Afterall how many times has someone rung up and asked "Do you own a home?" or "Are you interested in double glazing?", they aren't always sales people, sometimes they are just checking to see if someones at home.

Mouse,
As I mentioned pinging "could be used" but isn't totally useful, afterall I could rig a network up throughout and office block, and make a ping cycle around a couple of times before being allowed out, thus making it look like it travelled miles.

Okay I'm a sucker for making things complicated and they can be simplified, but I enjoy the challenge sometimes.