IP lookup for abuse situation

[electricfox]

I woke up this morning to a concern/issue with one of my sites. Nothing too bad, certainly not fraudulant, just someone who posted some very inappropriate stories where they shouldn't have. Serves me right for allowing public posting I guess, but I thought I knew most everyone visiting.

Anyway...

How can I look up and find details about an IP? I've tried dnsstuff.com, and all it returns of value is the fact that they're AOL. It says something about virginia, but I bet AOL is just based there. Is there any way I can hunt down this person at all?

You'll usually get little more than a contact out of looking up the IP address in whois or something. Even less with AOL since they give away as little as possible about their network structure and divisions. AOL TOS will deal with complaints but will generally not name the individual unless you serve them with a gift-wrapped subpoena.

[generic]

I have dealt with AOL on several occasions. They only maintain ip information associated with user ids for 5 days. If you do not get your subpoena to them within 5 days, you will be unable to track them back.

If you want to report it further you could go to your local pd, but if its just bad comments language, etc, no specific threats that would fall under a "immediate danger to life or property" clause, it will go no further.

If you walked in my offfice, I would advise you to ban his ip from your blog or just remove the info.

Not much more you can do than that.

greg,

[electricfox]

I guess it's just one of those things. Just makes you wonder if the only reason why society run so smoothly is that people have to take responsibility for their actions. Without that external social motivation, internal motivation is obviously not enough for some people to control themselves. And with anonimity becoming more of the norm, one wonders where we're headed.

Sigh.

[Funnyhat]

I had an issue a few weeks ago with a hacker injecting some code into a DB through SQL commands that were open... We got the IP from the logs and reported it to his ISP Comcast/At&t. I also contacted the FBI but they told me unless it is a loss of 5k or more they will just keep it on file... Last I herd from Comcast was the users access through their network was removed.