On November 06 2009 08:30 mmp wrote:
If the IM protocol is peer-to-peer, you can use a packetsniffer and sort through ALL of the information. If users are anonymized by the protocol, you can only really complain to the service that the user account be warned/destroyed.
Not sure what Windows folks like/trust, but tcpdump is a standard issue for Unix-based folks and easy to grep through.
If they are behind a proxy then you're out of luck, and you probably have near-zero chance of prosecuting (certainly in the US, but I don't know how gung-ho law enforcement is where you are).
Not to mention that the RIAA/MPAA/etc can't do diddly with only a person's IP address in the states. Cases are dropped left & right because it isn't sufficient evidence. This leads me to seriously doubt turning them over to the authorities will help, even if the OP's friend and the offender are both in the USA. Assuming they didn't use a proxy and your friend had their real IP address, they would have probably needed to have sent your friend child pornography or something conspiring of a terrorist attack for our authorities to bother wasting time and money. I don't see them looking into online sexual harassment.
That leaves the less legal alternatives that are available. I could try to explain the short route using a RAT but my testicles descended too long ago to bother with them. They died off in the mid to late 90's anyway, after a majority of the hackers of that generation adapted their tools over as legal Network Administration Utilities or went off to to become the security professionals of today (I'm looking at you l0pht -> @stake -> Symantec) which means 99% of what worked then is detected by modern antivirus software. Unless your friend's target was overly trusting and too stupid to have some form of antivirus and/or firewall, these wouldn't work. And that leaves the long way...
I'd have to start with use of port scanners to search for vulnerable services on the remote machine. I'd most certainly have to find one with GUI because I don't see your friend using CLI to do this (and even giving them a GUI they'd probably want step-by-step screencaps because they didn't understand a majority of what was in front of them). Even if I did explain all that and they (meaning I) successfully found a door in, I'd have to follow up with yet another guide covering how to "pick the lock," so to speak. To be honest, I feel that teaching any of this would likely be a disservice to the internet as a whole. I'm not willing to teach someone such methods so that they might run off and abuse the knowledge. Especially when they don't possess enough skill to find the methods for themselves. Not that it isn't all out there, but that I won't make it any easier than what I have. Your friend could've found the same guide I posted above with a three word search on Google ("get IP AIM" or "get IP MSN" or whatever). Three words and a press of the Enter key would have saved me the time spent writing the guide above. Three more ("Port Scan IP") could probably get them another step along the way but it's up to them to figure it out. I've already said too much.