I have tried countless ways to steal an IP address, primarily over aim. However, I have not found a successful way of doing it without making them click on a hyperlink. I was wondering how you can discreetly steal somebody else's IP address. I plan on doing this over AIM or IRC, and using netbus to play around with their mouse buttons and stuff. Any help would be greatly appriciated.

*Puts on flame resistant suit*

those "IP sniffers" dont work anymore its a old IE exploit, they fixed it along time ago.

I only know that this way works on MSN, I'm not sure about the others you mentioned.
Go to DOS Prompt and run the nestat command, and jot down all the ip's.
Then send a file to the person who you want to steal the ip off. While you are sendin the file use the nestat command, the ip address that was not there before is that of your victim.

P.S I'm quite a newbie myself so if I've got the above wrong please point it out. Thanx.

you are fairly correct. the key point is to initiate a direct connection, then go check netstat. as you mentioned, a file transfer works as those are done via direct connections.

normal chatting on most large networks is done using the servers as a proxy. when you send a message to someone, you send it to the server first, and the server forwards it. In this manner, there is no connection to your "buddy" so you cannot retrieve their ip by using netstat. when you initiate a file transfer, you make a connection directly to them, without going through the server.

[This message has been edited by cense (edited 12-09-2002).]

This may sound dumb, but wouldn't there be a ton of ip addresses to harvest from file sharing programs because of all the direct connections?

Yes there would be, but what would you do with them? They're about as useful as phone numbers.

Yep and DOS attacks = Prank calls.