Is Your Personal Email Account Being Hacked?

Did someone hack your personal Email/Facebook/hi5 accounts? Or did someone create any fake facebook/hi5/myspace profiles with your personal information? Yurp, Most of buggers are doing those things and having fun over it. Most of mails I received were regarding those matters and it seems most of girls facing those problems

So how do we find out the buggers who are trying to play against you? You may think they can be experts in computer programming and you are not much good enough to tackle them. Remember this; there is no one we can call as a genius unless they are really good enough depend on their experience. If so they won’t waste their valuable time to do those silly things rather than research on a new thing. So be Optimistic. The hacker's simple mistake will be enough to track him easily. In this post I’ll explain you few simple ways of locating hackers.

Basically the easiest way is to track his IP and locate him. The IPs can be dynamic or static. For example for website hosted servers or registered companies have static IPs. That assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). It won’t change periodically. But our local machines IPs are dynamic. When we reset the router, our IP will be changed.

So how do we gonna track hacker's IP?? There are many ways of tracking IP. One way is allow him to click a link. That will be the easiest way unless the hacker uses any proxy browser. You can simply host a web page which locates IP of page requester and save it with the requested time. You can use an online free hosting server for it and pass that web page link in a tricky way to people that you want to track. The following php code stub will trace the IP of page requester and save it to a text file along with the requested time.

$clientip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$myFile = "testFile.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'a') or die("can't open file");
$thetime = time();
$stringData = "$clientip -- $thetime \n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);
?>

Simply opening that text file you can get all IPs with accessed time.

So is that the only way to trace an IP? Nope there are many. Another way is if the hacker sent you a mail you can read the mail header information find out his IP unless he use Gmail. So what about Gmail? Actually most of hackers use Gmail to send mails. One advantage is, it doesn’t show senders IP and the other one is we can send anonymous mails using gsmtp.gmail.com server.
[For more information about anonymous mails see my previous post: -
http://gamenuwan.blogspot.com/2007/03/send-automatic-mail-using-smtp-server.html ]

Then if some one sent an email through yahoo/msn/etc how are we gonna find out? It’s simple. Go to you mail box options and set visible true to view full header of your email. Refer the following image of a yahoo mail header. The "Received: from [xxx.xx.xxx.xx]" is the sender's IP address.

Now you know few ways to trace someone's IP. After tracing the IP along with accessed Date and time how you gonna locate him?
First you can find out the location & registered names by searching it in IP lookup site.
Ex:- http://ip-lookup.net/, http://www.dnsstuff.com/

If he has a static IP you will be getting the registered name, location and some other information. But if he has a dynamic IP then the IP locating site will result the location and details of his Internet Service Provider (ISP). So you know the IP with accessed time. The ISP can locate him by tracing that mapped IP with time that he used it. The ISP has pool of IPs and dynamically mapped that IPs among users. So all the mapped IPs, Timestamps and the mapped user details should be logged on their servers.

Actually I explained you some simple methods to trace IPs. Those are more accurate and efficient methods. Other than that there are many other ways of tracing an IP.

Some other methods to trace hackers:-
- You can create a .swf with an action script in order to steal cookies, IP, etc and send it as an Email attachment
- If you know his email address you can send a messenger request and trace his IP while chatting. Ex:- You can share a file and run "netstat -a" in your command prompt or you can use WireShark tool I explained in my previous posts or You can use Sharp-IP-Getter to trace IP while chatting in the yahoo messenger]
- If you are familiar with Cross-site scripting (XSS), you can use malicious scripts to trace hackers or even to hack mail accounts.
- You can send a KeyLogger to monitor his all activities and received them via a mail.