How to contact the Hacker's ISP
InternetPeriscope enables you to get the name, address,
phone number, fax number, and email address of
an attempted intruder's Internet Service Provider (ISP).
InternetPeriscope's
Whois IP address Tool enables you to do this.
In some cases, InternetPeriscope can also get you
the name, address, phone number, fax number,
and email address of the hacker's employer.
In the figure below, the user is
Viewing a History of Intrusion Attempts, Specifically, the user is viewing information
on the intrusion attempt from IP address 4.60.103.165. (This is from a real intrusion attempt. Intrusion attempts are a common
occurence, and this in no way should be considered
a blemish on the reputation of the ISPs mentioned here.)
Note that this hacker attempted to connect to
port 111,
the SunRPC Portmapper service. As of this writing,
many hacker's have been scanning machines for
exploits against this service.
First, the user will obtain the hacker's ISP information
by clicking on the "Get ISP contact info (arin.net)..." button.
The brings up the
"Whois (arin.net)" dialog box shown below.
Note that the IP address, 4.60.103.165 has already been
filled in for you in the "Search String" box.
Also note that the Registry is set to the "American Registry
for Internet Numbers". If it turns out that this intrusion
attempt came from Europe or Asia, you will have to select
the appropriate registry (InternetPeriscope will let you
know if this is necessary).
The user then clicks on the Search button to find the ISP's
contact information. Unfortunately, the "American Registry
for Internet Numbers" is busy, and displays the following
message.
The user clicks on the OK button, waits 10 seconds,
and then again clicks on the Search button to
obtain the following results:
Here we see that BBNPlanet is the Maintainer
of the hacker's IP address. We also see that
it might be a good idea to send an email to
genuity.net about this incident. Scrolling down,
we see near.net, bbnplanet.com, and barrnet.net
also take part in managing the IP address range
that contains the hacker's address.
At this point, you would probably want to send email
to: abuse@genuity.net, abuse@near.net, abuse@bbnplanet.com, and abuse@barrnet.net, (and any email addresses listed in the whois results),
notifying them of the date, your timezone, the hacker's IP address, and the port scanned by the intruder.
If the attack is of great concern, you may wish to find
even more contact info for these ISPs, to make
sure the relevent people are notified. InternetPeriscope
enables you to do this with its
Whois (Domain Name) Tool, and by using its
DNS features
to find the Source of Authority for the domains (genuity.net, near.net, bbnplanet.com, and barrnet.net).
In this case, the user wishes to find more contact information
for BBNPlanet, as she feels that they are the best
point of contact for this incident. She closes all the
open dialogs, and then invokes the "Whois (Domain Name)"
dialog box by clicking on the Tools menu, moving her
mouse over the "Whois" menu item, and clicking on
"Domain Name...", as shown in the figure.
She enters "bbnplanet.com" into the "Search String",
and clicks on "Search".
The figure below shows that she now has a few
more email addresses and phone numbers she
can use to contact the ISP (scroll down to see all of them.)
Going back to the Intrusion History dialog, we see that InternetPeriscope has
found a host name, lsanca1-ar20-4-60-103-165.vz.dsl.gtei.net,
for the hacker's machine.
InternetPeriscope did this by
using DNS
to look up the PTR Record for the IP address 4.60.103.165. Since InternetPeriscope
was able to find the host name, the
"Get Domain Contact Info (networksolutions)..." button is enabled.
If InternetPeriscope cannot find a host name, this button
will be disabled.
The user then clicks on the
"Get Domain Contact Info (networksolutions)..." button and the
dialog shown below appears.
InternetPeriscope has "guessed" that you wish to find
contact info for the domain gtei.net (Remember that the
host name is: lsanca1-ar20-4-60-103-165.vz.dsl.gtei.net,
and that
whois is used for looking up Second Level Domain [SLD] Names.)
The user then clicks on the Search button to obtain the
following results:
This dialog displays email addresses at
bbnplanet.com and gtei.net. In addition to
these addresses, the user should also
send email to abuse@bbnplanet.com
and abuse@gtei.net. Most ISP's maintain
an "abuse" address for handling hacker
and spam problems.
Using the Whois dialogs to find contact info for ISPs
and domains in Europe and Asia requires that
the user use a different registry. The reader is
referred to the
Whois (IP Address)
and Whois (Domain Name) documentation.
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