How to reveal the identity of a Webmaster
August 26, 2008 – 9:44 pmA lot of times we are very interested in the identity of a certain webmaster.
Identifying a webmaster could be done in a few ways:
First, pulling the domain WHOIS records is the easiest part of the process. But not all domains/registrars will reveal that information.
The second thing you want to do is to Google for any email addresses of the webmaster.
For example, if the website has an info@ mail address or a webmaster@ one you should search it because sometimes people are very discrete regarding their identity in a controversial website, but forget to do so in other places like support forums, talkbacks etc.
and The final thing you could do is to search and analyze the website logs. This is abit tricky (and partially illegal) because you have to guess the path for the website logs/statistics.
Usually a website statistical information will remain confidential in a “secret” path that no one knows, though the folder that contains the information will usually not be password protected.
Common paths for websites logs/statistics are the following:
/stat
/stats
/statistics
/webstats
/logs
/log
/webalizer
/awstats
/awstats.pl
/cgi-bin/awstats
/cgi-bin/awstats.pl
/cgi-bin/awstats/awstats.pl
/usage
After you found the stat system you can find out the IP address of the website owner by checking out who is viewing certain files or directories in the webserver. For example, the webmaster will probably be the one who is visiting the “/admin” directory, or the one who is eating most of the website bandwidth.