Find Someone's IP With iChat and Terminal

Hey guys, this is Mack Heads 101, and today I'm gonna be showing you how to use Terminal and iChat to get someone's IP address.

Now, what is someone's IP address? You might already know this, but it's a unique number that indicates their network. With that number, you can do things like figure out where they live, block their IP from your site so they can't visit your site, stuff like that. That’s generally what an IP is used for. You might have your own purposes, whatever.

So, this requires that the other person can video chat with you, or they have iChat, either one is fine. There are two methods to do this, and the first one I'm going to be showing you is with video chat. So first of all, we're gonna go into Terminal. We're gonna type sudo space TCP dump, and when you hit enter, normally it'll ask you to type a password. Just type the password; it won't show the letters that you type, but it's your user password. It's the password for the account that you're currently on.

In order for this to work, by the way, you have to be an administrator. But anyway, once you type this code, you'll see all this junk start flying up into Terminal. This is actually all of the network activity on your computer, so you'll see all of the information that's going back and forth from your computer to the Internet. We're gonna be using this to see what servers we're talking to using iChat. So, let's go ahead and start a video chat with my friend John. We're gonna be getting his IP address, so let's be see with him.

Alright, so now that I'm in a video chat with him, you'll see a pretty constant stream of traffic in my Terminal window. These are all the packets that are getting sent back and forth between me and my friend John. So, once we get like a couple of these, we can just go into Terminal and press control-c. You'll see each line looks pretty similar, actually.

Let me just make this Terminal wider so you can see each line independently. It has either a greater than or like either this thing before or after the greater than and this thing before after the greater than. Now, generally, if you see an IP that says 192.168, something, that's your local IP address. This isn't what we want; we want his remote IP address.

Now, we're going to get something very similar that is hosting. On the right side of the greater than, in this case, right here it's on the left side, you'll see pool-whatever.philadelphia.verizon.net and then some number. The number is the port; we don't worry about this. So, get everything up to the dot before the port number. So, everything from like here to here, from after the greater than right before the dot and then the number. So, we grab this and let's copy that.

Now, this is his hostname. In order to get his IP address from this, we just have to ping it. So, we type ping space and then we paste that in. We hit enter, and right here is his IP address. That’s his, like you just, that’s his IP address. His IP address is covering my Terminal window. So, that’s how to do it with video chat.

Now, a problem is that if you're trying to get someone's IP address, they probably don't know you too well, and they all want a video chat with you. So, there's another way to do it. It's less reliable, and I'm not sure if it'll work even in this video, but it's an option. So, I'm gonna end the video chat just to make things simpler.

What we're going to do is start a direct IM with my friend John. What that is, is whenever you send an image to someone, it connects directly to their computer, so that way everything is faster. So, let me just hit the up arrow twice and so that way we retype the TCP dump command. I'll hit enter again, and now I'm running TCP dump in my Terminal.

So, let's open a new chat with John, drag in an image file. You can just use any image and then hit enter. Now it says direct instant message session started. That means I'm connected either directly to him or to an AOL proxy.

Now, in this case, I'm connected to an AOL proxy, so I'm not actually getting his IP address, but in a lot of cases, it'll be someone else's IP. You'll be connected directly to that person. So, let's start spamming him with messages. You know, let’s send some random crap, a lot of crap, so that we fill up the window. Then, we'll hit control-c in the Terminal.

So, you'll see traffic very similar to what we had before where it's some hostname, a greater than my IP address, or my IP address greater than some hostname. Now, this hostname is clearly blue.al.com, so that’s not my friend; that’s not John's thing. So, in this case, it didn't work. But if this is an mend-whatever, then it should be whatever we had above, you know, pool-whatever.fire-o.stuff.rise and whatever their hostname is.

So, this will work only if it allows you to connect directly to them. I'm a special case because I have certain settings on my router, but for you, it should work. So, you'll have their hostname right there in the TCP dump.

So, I hope this helps anyone that's trying to get someone's IP address. It's pretty simple, this method, and it's worked for me in the past. So, thanks for watching Mack Heads 101. Subscribe and goodbye.