IP to Country tracking

I have heard that country can be identified from IP address segment.

Can someone help me how it is possible?

Anil Arora

URL

If you use PHP you could get the domain name from the IP address then work out the country from that!

That's fine if you have a .co.uk or a .com.au but genarally a .com can be located anywhere in the world!!

Yeah, always a problem. Suppose you could then do a PHP command to read:

file("http://www.netsol.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?STRING=" . $domain . "&SearchType=do&STRING2.x=25&STRING2.y=9");

line by line, then parse that to find out the location.

You have far too much time on your hands...

So incredibly true:



Gene Wilder - Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Considering proxies and ip spoofing, telling what country visitor came from through immidiate ip is only slightly better then fortune telling with crystal ball, so if you want to take your chances guessing fine - but just want you to know you damn sure not going to catch someone who doesn't want to be caught.

On the other hand, 99.999% users dont care whether you not your 'trace' them back like that. Heck, even yahoo sticks looked up address in email header so in most cases you can even say what provider letter was sent from.

Well someone obviously figured out how to trace someone to their P.o.P Host... take a look and give it go:

http://security1.norton.com/ssc/vr_...BMRSJRFSKLUKUMX

It doesn't trace the user right back to their desktop so to speak, but it does give details on the ISP and where their P.o.P location is.

So can .com.au's and .co.uk's, as well as most other country specific domains...

That's very true, but it would seem a bit stupid to get a .co.uk domain if your company was located in Australia. The point I was making was a general tracking idea, not a definate one.

First of all that doesn't tell you correct info if you're using proxy. Besided that, for my 'real' ip it only showed pop at one major city where my ips's headquarters are. Not my local pop, and considering that I live over 100 miles from the Big City - thats even another county - visual route may only tell state and may be region, but no more then that.

AlCapone,

I was merely pointing out that someone has found a way to track someone to their P.o.P. When I tried (with Proxies enabled) it, it traced it all the way back to the P.o.P I dial into (which is incidently 35KM/s away).

I was not saying that it couldn't be fooled, or that it wasn't in accurate, because it can be. I was merely pointing out a proof of concept.


== START RANT #2000 ==

Besides, sometimes tracking a person back to their P.o.P is all you need anyway, because you or the police (more likely) can contact the owners of the P.o.P and ask for copies of their logs.

For example, most people in australia have Caller ID enabled on their phone lines and don't realise it, so their phone numbers aren't hidden when they dialup or make a phone call, which is bad news for a newbie if the P.o.P annex supports CID in the logs and they're tryin somethin stupid. I don't know if other countries like the US support CID on their phone lines though.

== END RANT #2000 ==

1. Yes, the U.S. does have CID.

2. It is impossible to be 100% sure on the geographic location of an arbitrary IP unless you physically check. Some IPs are associated with satellites and mobile units such as U.S. Navy ships.

3. That given, it's easy to be reasonably accurate for most purposes such as advertising, drawing pretty graphs, etc., but not for any sort of security purposes.

4. IPv6 will make this a little easier since they plan to farm out address space based, in part, on geographic location.