I have a character in my book who was hacking into someone’s data lines when his security programs started warning him that he’d gotten caught. Hm, not sure if that’s making sense. Maybe if I post the section in question:
In other words, does this section make sense, or would you laugh yourself out of the room if you’d read it in a book?
You need to know the IP address to ping it.
I wouldn’t worry about getting the computer stuff correct in your book. Nobody else gets computer stuff correct. If you did get it correct most of the reading audience would think it boring and lame.
I could ping any recognize name. As an example, ping www.google.com
DNS handles the conversion from name to IP address.
Additionally many firewalls detect, determine all probes against them with I believe a trace routine. Early on before home firewalls were common I had an PC that I used to share internet and run BLACKICE. BlackIce would report all the probes against my systems.
A good hacker would not probe someones dataline without some intermediaries to prevent proper tracing.
I guess I am saying your quoted exchange does not make much sense to me.
Jim
First sentence is just not true, the second one is reasonable and I think good advice.
Jim
[Disclaimer - I’m no expert, but have been in the company of experts for at least a decade]
The “trying” bit sounds suspect me. They either ping it or they don’t. The only way you know it’s happening is when the ping packet/s arrive, at which point you’ve already been pinged. If you’ve disabled ping response, that’s fine, but you’ve still been pinged.
Also, it’s unlikely they’d say “ping my IP address”; they’d probably say “ping my server”, “ping my computer”, or “ping me”.
Sure it is. How else is the ping addressed if not with IP address?
Already explained, Ping the DNS name.
example Ping www.google.com and discover that 64.233.161.99 is 15ms away. 
Jim
I just don’t see how knowing the DNS name is not really the same as knowing the IP address. The computer that is sending the ping packet knows the IP address. It is not like once you know the DNS name that the IP address can somehow be kept secret.
So the bad guys are pinging goodguy.com?
You are splitting hairs I think. You said “You need to know the IP address to ping it.”
I was simply correcting you. I do not need to know the IP address of the Yankees, I simply ping www.yankees.com and I learn their IP address.
Your statement was not correct and I was letting you know it was.
I use this quite often in the office as I am more likely to know a Computer’s name then address.
Jim
The Op solicited a simple Computer Geek answer, a computer geek has provided one.
There are many ways to determine an IP address. Get a network Expert into the thread and he will bore you to tears with the ways. The simplest method is a good firewall appliance that logs and traces back all probes. The Software has been around for a long time and available to mid-level Computer geeks like me since the late 90s.
Jim
In order to ping something the IP address needs to be known. The fact that we have a convenient architecture for quickly and easily looking this up does not change the fact that the IP address needs to be known by the pining computer.
Can’t we assume our hero is doing his hacking from a machine that wouldn’t have a reverse DNS lookup? Then you’d need to know the IP address. Right?
I’m with gazpacho - internet traffic is addressed by IP, not DNS (or any other) name. If you ping www.yankees.com, you are actually performing a DNS lookup on that name, followed by sending ping packets to the resulting IP address.
If your selected DNS server doesn’t, for whatever reason, recognize a name, you can’t ‘ping’ it, regardless of whether the computer other exists or not.
First off, is the Computer Pining for the Fjords? 
I do not the IP address of most computers, I ping the computers by name and get results. To me this answers the Op as “No, I do not need to know the IP to be able to ping it”.
Jim
I also meant to say that, while no guru, I know a fair bit about this stuff and the OP sounded pretty reasonable to me. The only thing I thought sounded a little low-tech to be coming out of a geek’s mouth is “security programs”. You could say something like “IDS” or “NIDS” (Intrusion Detection System/Network Intrusion Detection System) or maybe technically less correct but more accessible would just be “firewall”.
A new question, I would assume our hero is doing his hacking from behind a good firewall where you could not ping him even with his IP address.
Regardless to ping something you either type ping <ip address> or ping <system name> if you do ping <system name> the system has to resolve the name to a number via DNS then the ping goes to the number so at that point you do know the IP address yo uwant to ping.
I know I just split hairs
I’ve pinged IPs and DNS names myself; I know a little bit about networking. But I’ve always pinged something I already knew (like Google), and I know nothing about actually trying to break into something illegally. I considered trying to contact Cult of the Dead Cow for info, but their website doesn’t really inspire much confidence (imagine that).
So what would be a reasonable way for him to get caught, assuming he is a really good hacker? I do intend to leave it as simple and vague as I have it in that example; no one wants to read a how-to manual on hacking in a thriller, but I hate when I see something that’s just plain wrong in books I read.
MrSquishy gets it in one. Those of you who bring up things like pinging google.com are technically right but contextually wrong. The person in the situation described by by the fictional excerpt in the OP isn’t going to have bought up a domain name and associated it with their IP address for the duration of their sneaky-footed hacking expedition. Most likely not a static IP at all. They might conceivably be pingable at something like pool-68-236-23-29.phil.east.verizon.net but you’d be even less likely to come up with that randomly assigned bunch of garbage than to just guess the IP address itself.