Besides their location, can you find anything else about a person based on their IP address?

February 22, 2004 11:17 PM

Besides their location, can you find anything else about a person based on their IP address? [Like, for example, if you suspect a friend of joke spamming your website and you want to prove it's them?]
posted by adrober to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Hop on over to arin.net and type in the ip. It'll tell you who ownes the block of IPs in that range, which may help you narrow it down some.
posted by woil at 11:21 PM on February 22, 2004

If you have access to a Unix shell

nslookup x.x.x.x

or

traceroute x.x.x.x

might tell you something interesting.
posted by lbergstr at 11:57 PM on February 22, 2004

Under Windows 2000 and XP (at least), you can use nslookup and traceroute (it's called tracert.exe in Windows) just as easily as in Unix.
posted by skynxnex at 3:30 AM on February 23, 2004

I like using SamSpade for quick and dirty address digging.
posted by brownpau at 6:13 AM on February 23, 2004

disclaimer: using these programs in the wrong way is illegal and possibly dangerous to your health and future employment possibilities.

If you are crazy enough to get on the same physical network as the ip address you can do a few more things, like use nessus or nbtscan to find NetBIOS computer name, network card MAC address, logged-in Windows user name, etc.

You really shouldnt do this though, unless they are on a school network that you can hook up to or something.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 7:15 AM on February 23, 2004