Anonymous Posting

Tracing of people who post anonymously is not as hard as you would think but they have to say something that you could bring court or police action into. Your anonymity is protected as a blog site will protect your identify (IP Address) not letting it fall into the hands of somebody you just ticked off. That being said if you were to say something libelous or had some knowledge of an unsolved crime then you should be aware that the PC you did this from has the potential to be tracked down.

The police contact the website prove their case and get access to the IP address. The IP address can be traced to a service provider not a very tricky thing to do you just do a whois search. This will give you the named owner of the person who owns the address range. This may be a large ISP or company. Once you have this name you contact them using the Telephone number provided asking them nicely about things like their process for providing information on users and perhaps about their acceptable use policy. If you have evidence of the wrong doing you can share with the company often they are only to happy to help, if you have the correct credentials. Now I hear you say “but the address range used my ISP is private registered address space, the old RFC 1918/NAT argument”, but this does not hold water. Just because it’s not publicly addressable the ISP/Company keeps records for billing/administrative purposes. If your ISP/Company leverage DHCP the DHCP server itself logs which physical device is assigned an IP address at any one time. If you have a cable modem they have you at this point. If you used dial up then the same process may have to be gone through with the teleco but at this stage this does not take very long.

I’ve been involved were somebody was publishing libelous information from a chain of internet cafes. What had not occurred to them was that for security reasons the internet café had installed surveillance camera’s. The perpetrator was identified from the surveillance video and then the guy still got a tap on the shoulder. The camera showed the guy at the computer at the time that computer uploaded the libel.
There is always a way around this type of protection lets face it most phones are still analog. I remember a simple way in the old UK Travel lodges. Each room had a payphone but because they had done it on the cheap you could unscrew the faceplate for the phone unplug the payphone wire in you laptop/telephone and call all night for free. Camera’s were something of a problem but a simple disguise and paying for the room in cash gave a good level of protection. This was a common move for pedophiles who traded images directly taking advantage of secure tunnels using 3DES.