Basics of Hacking, Part 1: IP Address

An IP Address or an internet protocol is a numerical address assigned to a device connected to a computer network which uses IP address for communication between its various nodes.

An IP address has two prime functions:

* Network or host identification
* Location addressing

An IP address is generally a 32-bit(or 4-byte) number where each byte is separated from each other by a dot(.). Each computer has a different IP Address based on the location of the computer on the network.

IP addresses are generally of two types:

* Static IP Address: When the IP address of the computer does not change, every time it powers up. This is called a static IP address. It is generally set manually by the user or the admin of the network.
* Dynamic IP Address: This type of IP address changes or fluctuates regularly between a certain range.

Prior to attacking the target's machine or preparing to safeguard our own machine against the foreign attacks, it is needed that we should have some basic knowledge about the IP Address of the machine.

Tracing IP Address

When it comes to tracing of IP Addresses, there are more than thousand of ways. Here i will cover some of the basic tricks of tracing IP and will add more ways of tracing IP's in future posts in this blog.

1. Tracert: tracert is a MS DOS command which is used to visually see a network packet being sent and received and the amount of hops required by that packet to reach its destination. For eg. if we use command "tracert www.msn.com" then it will show us how the packet is being sent from our machine to the server and by which route.
2. Netstats: netstat (stands for Network Statistics) is a command line instruction that is used to display the incoming and outgoing connections of a network. For eg. we can use command "netstat -n" to display the incoming and outgoing connections of our network, here "-n" is used to display the active TCP connections in numerical form only.
3. Location trace: If we want to trace the location of the destination machine where our packets are being sent, we can use tools like "NeoTrace pro". the purpose of these tools is to monitor the current location of the packet which was sent from or machine. These kind of tools are very useful for tracking criminals and keeping an eye over our personal network and preventing any unauthorized access to our network.