Where is this guy, anyway?

I did a trace route, which looks at each piece of equipment between my computer and his (called a "router", if you were curious), and tries to identify what named IP address it is at. With some creative interpretation, you can usually tell what country, possibly state / city or other local information a particular address is at. I've eliminated some of the data hops just because, but here is the command and part of its output. My comments follow each line in {}:

C:\temp>tracert 217.52.77.85

Tracing route to 217.52.77.85 over a maximum of 30 hops

{hop#  ------Ping times-------  What reverse DNS address is at that IP address}

 10    22 ms    22 ms    25 ms  ex1-p5-0.eqabva.sbcglobal.net [151.164.191.134]

 11    21 ms    21 ms    26 ms  ex2-p3-0.eqabva.sbcglobal.net [151.164.189.30]

 12    85 ms    29 ms    28 ms  equinixexchange-ash.flagtelecom.com [206.223.115.141]

{Next hop jumps overseas?}

 13    98 ms    98 ms   102 ms  so-5-2-0.0.cjr02.ldn004.flagtel.com [62.216.128.74]

 14   175 ms   181 ms   178 ms  so-0-0-0.0.cjr04.alx001.flagtel.com [62.216.129.198]

{Could this next hop be Cairo?}

 15   176 ms   173 ms   179 ms  so-2-0-0.0.ejr01.cai001.flagtel.com [62.216.129.193]

{Yes! It is!}

 16   171 ms   177 ms   179 ms  nileonline-gw-cairo.flagtel.com [80.77.0.46]

 17   168 ms   177 ms   174 ms  62.140.103.228

{Nile-online.net -- go there with your browser}

 18   172 ms   171 ms   177 ms  gza.nile-online.net [62.140.118.70]

 19   171 ms   176 ms   169 ms  62.140.104.168

 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.

{The rest time-out, so a router isn't passing back the trace pings.}

Some digging got me to http://www.nile-online.net/index.pl/contact_us and their location being in Egypt. Now, is this a bad guy located in Egypt? We can't tell -- for all we know now this is some guy that just got a computer for his family, brought it home, didn't patch it, doesn't have a firewall, and the bad guys have taken it over and he no longer owns his new computer ... the bad guys own it and will use that computer and his internet connection for a whole lot of things that go way beyond this document.

If you have questions or comments, please ask! My contact page is here.

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