Using Sam Spade

In using the Internet, one often needs to determine where certain traffic comes from. The traffic might be a scan, a request for a web page, or an email. Since each packet contains a source IP number, by determining that number and who controls it one can obtain a great deal of information about the true meaning of the traffic. Once the 'owner' of the IP address is determined appropriate action can be taken if the situation warrants. A number of command-line tools were developed on UNIX systems during the early days of the Internet to assist in determining the source of Internet traffic. These tools include: whois traceroute finger ping and nslookup. While a number of these have been implemented in the various Windows operating systems the Sam Spade utility provides all these tools and more in a graphical user interface. Sam Spade for Windows is free and available at www.samspade.org/ssw. This paper will examine a number of the more useful tools in Sam Spade.