In-House Counsel Guidebook: How to Handle Internet Defamation and Online Reputation Attacks August 2014 | Page 11

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turn, can be used to subpoena the internet service provider
for subscriber information associated with the IP address.
However, an attorney must ensure the cyber investigator is
not creating ethical problems. A primary technique cyber
investigators often use is “pre-texting,” which involves
misrepresenting his or her identity to attempt to get the
author of a harmful post to take some action in order to
obtain the author’s IP address. In most states, if an attorney
hires a cyber investigator to do pre-texting, the attorney can
be found to have violated that states’ ethical rules.
B. Through a subpoena to a third-party website hosting the
damaging content, in-house counsel can obtain personally
identifying information pertaining to the poster of the
harmful content. The full process is fleshed out more in our
Subpoena Guide for Identifying Anonymous Internet
Posters, but, in short, the objective is to obtain personally
identifying information from the website and internet
service provider (ISP). Once the identity of the attacker is
known, the company and attorney can decide how they wish
to proceed.

Many times, since anonymous posters often know better
than to disclose any personal information (such as name and
personal email address) when registering with a website, the
only helpful information received in response to a subpoena
is the IP address. Once an IP address is obtained, an attorney
can identify the associated internet service provider, such as
AT&T or Comcast, through a simple internet search such as
on the website: http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup.
Once the ISP is identified, an attorney can issue a subpoena

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