IpAddressTracking
IP Address tracking is the process of collecting as much information on an IP Address as you can without any prior knowledge of who uses that IP address.
The first step in IP Address tracking is to determine the IP Address Location. It is an easy process to find the country that an IP address is from using an IP to country service. You can find one at http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ and the Spider Hunter IP database has one as well.
The next step is to find out the route that the data travels when going from your IP address to the IP address you are tracking. You can use the trace route command to find all of the devices, typically routers and interent gateways, that are between your IP address and the IP address you are tracking. The trace route will also give you the DNS names of all the devices in the route.
The DNS name of the IP address can often tell you much about the location and use of the IP address. Many time you will see thinkgs like PPP or Dialup in the DNS name, these are usually slower dial up connections. Anything with DSL will most likely be a broadband connection and much faster. Some DNS names even have the city they are located in or route through as part of the name.
The DNS name also tend to carry the domain name of the company who control the IP address. This will tend to be teh responsible party for the IP address you are tracking. If the actualy IP address you are tracking does not have a reverse DNS name, then look at the last few entries of the trace route these last few IP addresses will most often be the ISP for the IP address you are tracking.
At this point you may have a domain name to lookup, you do this with a whois lookup. You can also do an ARIN whois to look up the IP Address directly. The whois or ARIN Whois are the only publically available tools that give you the chance of getting a real world address that may be used for the IP address you are tracking.
You may also be interested in the services that the IP address has running on it. By doing a port scan you can see what is exposed to the Internet, connect to any open ports and sometimes get more information. Often you only need to telnet to socket 80 to check for HTTP and socket 25 to check for SMTP, most other ports are blocked or won’t give you usefull information, unless you intend to hack the IP address.
Sometimes when doing a telnet to socket 25, the SMTP will give you a domain name that you had not seen before. Check that one out as well.
90% of the time you will run into a dead end. You will get to the ISP, but the only way you can get any farther is to conact them and request information on one of thier customers. That tends not to go well, but complaining about abuse to them sometimes gets them to have it stopped.
To my knowledge there is no way to directly get the telephone number of a person from an IP address. I see that question a lot ….
