Use my clues to track down hacker | CHA

Now that you know the potential hackers IP address, you can use that to track them down. The first thing you want to do is get a general geographical location for the user. This can be done using the GeoIPTool site. When you are at that site, enter the IP address for the remote user you saw connected to your computer. GeoIPTool will then display the general location for this IP address as shown below.



As you can see from the above image, the remote IP address that connected to your computer is supposedly located in Clifton, New Jersey in the USA.

Unfortunately, the GeoIP information is not always accurate, so we want to use another tool called Traceroute to corroborate what the GeoIPTool showed. Traceroute is a program that will print out the host names of all the devices between your computer and the remote one. As ISPs typically give hosts names to their devices using geographical names, we can get further clues as to the location of the IP address.



To use Traceroute you can go to this web site: www.net.princeton.edu/traceroute.html. Once there, enter the hackers IP address and click on the Go button. A traceroute process can take a while, so you may want to do something for 5-10 minutes and then come back and check the results. When done, you should see output similar to what is shown below.

Notice the hostname of the last device in the traceroute and the portion that I highlighted. Based upon the information we received from GeoIPTool, this further confirms that the IP address most likely belongs to someone from Clifton, New Jersey. In a real example, though, it will not always be as easy to figure out the location of a remote IP address. In those situations your best bet is to contact the abuse department for the ISP that owns the remote IP address and let them know what is going on. They will usually issue an alert to the hacker, which if nothing else, will scare them enough that maybe they wont do it again. To find out the name of the ISP that owns the particular IP address, you can go to http://whois.arin.net and enter the IP address in the Search Whois field in the top right of the home page. This will look up and list the Internet service provider that owns that particular IP address and will usually contain an email you can contact. If you plan on reporting this hack to the authorities, you should avoid contacting the ISP at this time. Finally, someone accessing your computer without permission can be a federal crime, so if you are truly concerned, you can gather all of this information and contact your local police department's cyber crime division. If your police department does not have this division then you can contact theFBI Cyber Crime division.