Guest Author - Lisa Shea

Your IIS server logs always track the IP addresses of your visitors. But if you would like to show them to your users on the fly, here's how you do it.

The command in ASP is

Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR")

so to assign this to a variable to then display or log in your database, you would use -

IPAdd = Request.ServerVariables("REMOTE_ADDR")

You can use this to make it more obvious to a user that is violating security that you know who he or she is. Again, your IIS logs always keep a permanent records of your visitors, so you know from them exactly who did what, and when. But to give the hacker proof that you are tracking this information, it helps to display it on the screen in your trapping code.

You can also use the IP address for security clearance, or to track exactly where newsletter subscriptions came from. That helps in the case of a malicious user signing up people for newsletters without their permission.

It's a sad fact of life that people with few morals exist in the world, people who enjoy destroying what others spend years to create. By making it obvious to hackers that you are tracking their information, you might encourage them to move on to another way of spending their time.

Hacking is a federal offense, and carries penalties of fines from $500 up through prison terms. If you are hacked, contact the appropriate authorities. The hacker you set free might be the hacker that destroys someone else's site tomorrow.

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