A good friend of mine recently put up a website, it was nothing special just a homepage about himself, you know the sort “Hi, my name’s Darren here’s a picture of my cat etc…”. Anyway this website had a guestbook and one day Dave checked the site to find that some prick had been messing around with the guesboook, leaving dirty messages, pornographic pictures etc… This same prick (we suspect) sent Darren an e-mail with a virus attatched the very same day. All of theset hings caused Darren to remove his site from the net. Now neither of us know who this scumbag is and I was wondering if there was any way to trace people who do this kind of thing? Neither of us know much about computers and I was wondering if there was any kind of program which could do the detective work for us. I would use search engines but I don’t know quite what to search for. I’ve tried tracking softwarem tracing software , everything I can think of and the searches turn up blanks every time. Would any of you guys know if software like that exists and where I can get it (preferably for free)?
There are not a whole lot of options, even for the socially unacceptable behavior that you’re describing. Many times it’s even perpetrated by someone who’s purloined a parent’s or a friend’s e-mail address. However, start here:
– perform a search for the e-mail address using a popular search engine on the outside chance that he or she has a website of their own.
– use an e-mail lookup system to see if they can be identified (e.g, http://411.com/)
– go to the ISP providing the service and complain about the behavior. You’ll want to be specific about the offenses and make it clear that you hold them responsible because the messages are originating from their site. They are unlikely to identify the person, but are likely to deny them further service. As you probably know, the service provider is identified through the domain name (johnsmith@domainname.com).
– examine the detailed message header for clues to the source of the message.
Go to http://www.thefreesite.com and look for their free web page guestbook listings. Specifically find one that says you can edit the guestbook entries. (I just got a guestbook for my nephew, that’s what I did.) There is no reason your friend should be virtually “held hostage” by this prick.
As far as viruses in email - that is a risk we all take. Get a really good virus program, or perhaps consider using Yahoo email, which (I believe) has built-in virus checking.
As far as tracking this guy down after the fact, I don’t have any advice about that. I think the best revenge is living well. So in this instance, just going on having fun with a web page (and tamper-free guest book) and worry-free email (like Yahoo) might be a good way to go.
No, you probably won’t find out who he was. There are ways to get the IP address that the person was on to access the guestbook, submit data, etc, but if that wasn’t logged at the time you’re out of luck.
Not only that, but anyone who sends a virus in an email probably isn’t using a regular old ISP’s mail, but a webmail service. There are even ways to telnet into some unprotected mail servers (I have’t found any, but I didn’t look very hard either–most likely these are almost all gone) and create mails under completely fake email addresses (eg- u_suk@virus-mail.com).