Possible to locate people who view your website?

[shuRe]

My dad came home today and asked me whether you can track down info about people who view a website without entering any details.

He asked this cause he was on a competitors website looking at thier products and 30 mins later he got a phone call from them asking why he had been on thier website??

I thought a firewall eliminated people doing this but is there a program to detect who is accessing your website and where they are from?

[Charles Wirth]

They can see your IP address and the admin might have been viewing access logs.

All servers save access logs with time/date/IP/files accessed. If they know your IP or was watching for your IP (I have done this before) they can search the .txt file quickly.

If you tried to access FTP then that would stand out even more. We watch FTP like a hawk for who is trying to gain access.

[shuRe]

how would this guy have found out that it was my dads company looking at his website without some sort of illegal hack and not knowing thier ip address?

[viccyran]

Your computer ---> Router ----> site.

You're on a LAN connected to the router. You have a seperate IP address (probably the 192.168.x.x) from the internet. However, your WAN (internet IP) is still visible everytime you access anything. He might not know which computer in the house accessed the site, but he knows which house it is basically.

[edit]

oop. If you ment a software firewall, connected directly to a modem, it's somewhat of the same concept minus the router.

[[XC]thewildblue]

Awstats is a good free one to use. You can get that from sourceforge. It basically reads the logfiles of your webserver and the outputs them into an html format.

You would be easy to track if you have a fixed IP rather than a Dynamic IP.

[craig588]

He could have his server setup to alert him whenever it gets connections from some IPs or from a range. If he is parinoid and your dad is competition to him he might have flagged your dads companies IP.

You are broadcasting your IP all the time, how would a server know where to send your information unless you have an IP?

[masterofpuppets]

He could always use a proxy from another country. It's a hacker technique, but it can be put to other uses.