Hack with your mind! That’s enough?

Finding an anonymous individual is like looking for a needle in the desert — it’s full of twists and turns. Life is full of different kinds of stories, and I love listening to them, especially those rotting, decayed, worm-eaten tales. Today, let me tell you the story of catching a thief.

The faded qwerty keyboard under my fingertips has seen better days; its keys are so worn out that without a key map, you wouldn’t know where the letters are. But here I am, hammering away at it, firing off one command after another. Let me tell you this — hacking a regular person is the hardest thing in the world, while hacking a hacker is the easiest.

Now, if the target is a clever individual masquerading as “ordinary,” that’s when things start to get interesting. But before you devour this story in one gulp, let me lay down the premise.

Someone has been blackmailing a girl, using her personal documents and photos against her. The task of finding out who’s behind this fell squarely on my shoulders. No matter how hard I tried to dodge this responsibility, I couldn’t. So, I wrapped a metaphorical gamocha around my waist and jumped into the battlefield.

Starting with the victim’s account details, I dove in, testing out social engineering techniques one after the other, but nothing seemed to work. You see, like I said before, hacking a regular person is no joke.

When all else failed, I turned to Grabify, generating a link and attaching it to an image. I sent it to the target. This bait? It worked like magic. The moment they clicked the link, I got their IP address. Boom — what was once the entirety of Bangladesh was now reduced to a much smaller scope, narrowing the search by nearly 80%.

But even in such a densely populated area, finding one specific individual was exhausting. A quick IP lookup gave me the ISP’s address, but nothing more. My frustration was building — how was I supposed to find them? How?

Then, as I lit up a cigarette, inspiration struck. Every device in the world has a unique public IP address, except for those connected to the same WiFi router — they all share the same public IP.

I know you’ve got questions buzzing in your mind at this point, so let me break it down. Whether you’re using WiFi or mobile data, you’re connecting to the internet via some intermediary. If you connect to the internet through WiFi, for instance, all the devices on that network will show the same public IP.

If you don’t believe me, grab two devices connected to the same WiFi. Go to an IP lookup site on both and check — it’ll show the same IP address. This isn’t your ISP messing with you. It’s just how it works. When your router connects to your ISP using PPPoE, the ISP assigns a single public IP address to your entire network. So, whether you connect one phone, a laptop, or a dozen devices, the public IP remains the same.

For example, if my network’s public IP address is 103.145.234.221, then every device connected to that network will show the same IP.

Now, cellular data is slightly different, but it operates on similar principles. If you dig into your phone’s APN settings, you’ll see how it works. Those using older Samsung models will know exactly what I mean. APN names like blweb, gpinternet, and robiinternet act as proxy servers, resolving your connection to the internet.

The gist is simple: you’re not surfing the internet with your device’s public IP. You’re using a shared intermediary, and that’s why every device in your network has the same public IP address.

Armed with this understanding, I had a lightbulb moment. Since I had the target’s public IP address, all I had to do was match it with various routers across the city. Wherever the IP matched, that’s where my target was.

With nothing but logic and some careful observation, I pinpointed the target’s exact location with 100% accuracy.

Now, how did I scan all the routers in the city and match the IP? That’s a long story, and honestly, 95% of it was mental gymnastics. Maybe I’ll write about that part someday.

Of course, there’s an easier way to track someone using just their IP address — it’s often employed in law enforcement. What I did was essentially the same thing, but with a subtle twist. I’ll leave that part up to your imagination.

The point of writing all this? Hacking isn’t just about knowing programming or tools. Before you dive into the tools, you need to internalize networking concepts. Networking is what makes your device’s logic come alive.