Faking IP in chat?

[MSYahoo]

When we chat with someone over MSN or Yahoo messenger, it's easy to check out the person's IP address (netstat). Is there any way to fake our IP address to whomever we are chatting with? Eg, faking it so that it looks like an IP address from another country instead of the states.

[wige]

Fake your IP address? No. The person you are communicating with needs to be able to find the IP address you are on to send you replies.

However, you can use a proxy server to route your traffic to hide your final IP address.

[amxfan]

Wige is correct with what he said but I would like to add some additional caution. Now I'm not sure about Yahoo or MSN and how they connect or if this works with them for I never tried it, but I will say do not believe someone just because their IP address resolves. Back in the day "we" use to bounce across many proxies or bounced through Vhost setup on full shell accounts. "I did not not own the shell account". Depending on if an IP was assigned to the shell or not determined on if the address resolved. For the most part though we could be anyone we wanted to be and spoof just about any IP address. Again I'm not sure if this can be done with Yahoo/MSN or not but I know it works with IRC and Web browsing

Note they could also be bounced through a winbnc through someone else who is also running it.
Again this is all old school and it has been years since I have done or read anything on such things.

Wige is way more in the know of this stuff and he has really kept up with it "as much as I can tell from following his post" and I'm hoping he jumps back in here and lets me know if this type of spoofing still works and if it is still being used and is there any way of detecting it.

[wige]

I am not sure that spoofing an IP address would work for a chat session, because you need to get the responses from the person you are chatting with.

First, lets make sure we are all talking about the same thing. When I refer to spoofing an IP address, I mean that if your IP address is 1.2.3.4, you are telling the remote server a different IP address such as 2.3.4.5. Hiding your IP address in not the same thing. When you hide your IP, you are passing your traffic through a proxy so that the party you are chatting with can only see the IP address of the proxy server.

To give an example of spoofing, there is a method of denial of service attack called "smurfing" where you can flood a network with ping requests. When you launch the attack, you send a ping request to the network's broadcast address (so to knock out 192.168.1.100, you would send pings to 192.168.1.255) spoofing the address of the target system (192.168.1.100). This would cause every system on the network to respond to the ping, but send their responses to the wrong IP address.*

In chat, you do want to recieve the responses from the other party. A normal chat session goes as follows:

1.2.3.4: To 1.2.3.5|From: 1.2.3.4|Hello
1.2.3.5: To 1.2.3.4|From: 1.2.3.5|Hi there.

If you spoof your IP address, the person you are chatting with will not be able to respond, since their replies will go to the spoofed IP address:

1.2.3.4: To 1.2.3.5|From: 2.3.4.5|Hello
1.2.3.5: To 2.3.4.5|From: 1.2.3.5|Hi there.
2.3.4.5: To 1.2.3.5|From: 2.3.4.5|Uh, who are you?

* I used smurfing as an example since most modern networks disable or disregard traffic on the broadcast address, and as such the attack is no longer effective. Still, do not attempt.

[amxfan]

Wige thank you for the reply.

I was not sure if it worked or could work with Yahoo/MSN or not so I wanted to ask. Like I said it has been years since I have done or even tried to keep up with it. Last time I ever worked with anything of the sort was back in the sub7 DOS days. I also wanted to make MSYahoo sure of the fact that they can hide their IP as he/she seems to be skeptical of who they have been talking to. You really explained it in the last post.

Thanks.

To be honest, I prefer not to continue with this discussion as I do not want to give out any details of how this is done past what I have already done for I really would like the people who don't know to stay that way.