Security Question: Network Tracking

[LIMITAPROACHINGINFINITY]

Is it possible for any sys admins to track your mac adress or any other sort of computer identification when pluging into a public ethernet port. My university has these all over campus and I was wondering if administrators or other people are only able to log WHICH ethernet port had activity, as oposed to also being able to tell WHICH computer was connected to it. It there anyway they have access to ANY of MY information about my computer, or user info, or laptop type, or ANYTHING at all??

[C00kie]

Sure they are watching you!

Firstly they do IP sweep scans. Take a known IP address, and see weather the neighbours in the street or city also respond. If an IP address responds to the Ping (doorbell) they simply do a port scan.

Press your Start button, and select Execute. Type CMD there. You will get a DOS-like command prompt where you can enter ping and tracert commands (followed by IP numbers, web addresses etc!)

There is software that can point you to all your system/network volnerabilities. Don't know any names, it's there.

[TechnoWeeniePas]

Sure they can take your mac address...thats how the whole routing thing works...if they want they could even watch where you were surfing and such. Thats why you have encryption on ordering pages and such. As long as you have firewall software on and dont say have sharing enabled they shouldnt be able to tell much more than that though...but if it goes through their router they can watch that info.

[LIMITAPROACHINGINFINITY]

Sure they can take your mac address...thats how the whole routing thing works...if they want they could even watch where you were surfing and such. Thats why you have encryption on ordering pages and such. As long as you have firewall software on and dont say have sharing enabled they shouldnt be able to tell much more than that though...but if it goes through their router they can watch that info.

So if i am on a public ethernet, the administrators can find out my mac adress even if i have a firewall and are not sharing any folders?

[james0tucson]

There's not much work involved in finding your MAC address. And with that, it's pretty trivial to identify the type of machine. As for traffic, if you don't encrypt every packet at the endpoints, it's no big deal at all for them to sit and watch everything, read your email, your irc, log every socket you open and record every byte you send or receive. It's *easy* to do, if they are on the same ethernet segment as you. If it's not switched, you don't even need an admin to do it.

Now, as to whether they are actually watching your traffic, sysadmins are pretty lazy, so unless they are actually getting paid to do it, and being supervised.

These days, I'd imagine certain kinds of P2P activity will get the exact kind of attention you don't want.

[LIMITAPROACHINGINFINITY]

Is it possible to trace the mac adress to the owner of the computer? Call up manufacturers etc?

[TechnoWeeniePas]

Is it possible to trace the mac adress to the owner of the computer? Call up manufacturers etc?

Yes and no...technically speaking each network card has its own unique MAC address. Now its easy to find out who made that particular network card or chip but finding out who it belongs to is another story. If you registered your computer or network card they would technicaly be able to do a butt load of digging in records to find out that info...but then again what company put that much effort and give out customer info without a court order? And even so if you never registered the computer who is to say who owns it? Most stores dont take record of who they sold which computer to so the trail would probably end around there. But if you are doing something so bad that you have people trying to track you down via these methods there are plenty of other ways that they can find you that they would probably use rather than trying to do all that leg work.