Find something by IP address

the_syco

Hypothetical question: if I had a device that could call home if it were robbed, but only gave me the IP address it was on, could I somehow trace it, or is there a service that I could buy to find the location of it?

manna452121

I have used this for checking strange e-mails http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/

PogMoThoin

Yeah, I'm in Dublin, not. I'm 100 miles away

witnessmenow

If you whois'd the Ip address you could tell the ISP, but trying to extract who actually owns the IP address from the ISP is probably a no go

biko

Generally no, an IP is not a postcode.
It could give you the city but not the house, block.

Webmonkey

What is this device? - maybe GPS would be better

Capt'n Midnight

APRS or similar

have the device email you with it's gps location
only works if the device has a gps and is out doors
a mobile phone may be better for this

if you have an IP do a traceroute may give you more info if the ISP has put nice names on the routers


if you have an IP then the Guards can get the location from the ISP , if it's static broadband. Dial up / mobile broadband isn't that easy



This all assumes that the tea leafs firewall allows the device to communicate

wolfric

Might i ask what kind of device this might be? (ie laptop,computer,phone, random thing between laptop and phone like an ipad or something)

Best thing to have in order of importance:
IP
Webcam
Gps

Take a couple of snapshots of your thief and it's a done deal. I've read plenty of articles about laptops with built in webcams taking photos of the thiefs and catching them from that (and getting the laptop back) from obviously handing it over to the police and not trying it yourself.

Biggins

Magnus wrote: »

Generally no, an IP is not a postcode.
It could give you the city but not the house, block.

I don't know how the Americans do it but they managed to trace an I.P. down to an address, street, even the bloomin' pc that they were looking for.
Scary stuff.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19china.html?ref=technology

wolfric

If you have a massive corporate building you could no easier trace the "switching code" to a desk than you could trace an ip to a house. HOWEVER. if you simply contact the corporation and ask which desk the switching code belongs to and they'll tell you. Same with the isp. Not really scary at all. Your phone number is in the phone book. that's a WAY and i mean WAY easier system to track down your full name and address.

{^Syntax^}

If it's a laptop you're worried about being stolen I'd use something like logmein.com - you can hide the icon so when it boots up you'll see it's online and it'll give you it's IP Address.

You'd have to make note of the time it was online and contact the guards.

RIODEJ

Good topic to bring up.

Isnt there some thing that you can use to block your ip details when required?

Plus arent ip's changing all the time, when you log on, log off etc?

staby123

If it's a laptop, you could use this.

PogMoThoin

You are never safe, Your isp by law is required to record all your layer 3 headers for a yr (its 6 mths in europe). These may never be exposed, but they are recorded, Your layer 3 header will expose everything.

Cuddlesworth

Biggins wrote: »

I don't know how the Americans do it but they managed to trace an I.P. down to an address, street, even the bloomin' pc that they were looking for.
Scary stuff.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19china.html?ref=technology

Not to be blunt about this, but to find out that they would have had to first trace back to original ip(hackers would have used multiple proxy's on encrypted data streams etc) and then hacked the host network and pc's. So basically exactly what was done to them.

I remember a news article years ago about a American contractor who was working for a company doing defence contracts. He found out there was data being pulled off the servers, left the stream alone and after a few weeks traced it back to a rural part of china. He was positive that other company's data had been stolen, that there were multiple pc's on the same host network all running 24/7, which would imply shift work and a extreme amount of organisation as a single foot was never put out of place.

He went to the authorities and was arrested.

peeboo

Most of the IP tracing websites such as http://www.ip2location.com only can trace the Country, Region, City, ISP, etc of the IP address, not the home address or street address.

To get the home address or the personal info from the IP address, you will have to give the IP to law enforcement. They will trace it to the servers or proxy servers to check their logs in order to see who was using that IP at that time. But you will need a court order for sure.

Snowbat

Universities typically have their own AS or SWIP'd block so the address of their main campus comes up if you query Whois with one of their IP addresses. They also tend to have descriptive rDNS records. For instance, if you saw traffic from 134.226.81.61, you could be reasonably sure it came from the School of Mathematics at Trinity.

$ host 134.226.81.61
61.81.226.134.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pc1.maths.tcd.ie.

patchrick

On the topic, check out Adeona, its an open source lowjack software project that uses your laptop's built in webcam to take pictures of whoever steals your laptop.
Also, becoming more prevalent with html5 is geolocation. This works by using geotagged wireless access points in conjunction with your IP address to give an approximation of your location. The results can sometimes be scarily accurate! Check out a demo here.

imitation

As far as I know the only way is to do it through the authoritys, whois may tell you the provider, but the provider wont tell you who owns the connection due to data protection etc.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.22968

dealextreme = fun stuff , not stuff that needs to be 100% reliable