The programs running on your computer can give away information about your identity. Particularly those involved in file transfer and logging in to other computers. Contents 1 ident lookups 2 ftp logins 3 Telnet 4 ssh keys 5 Terminal Services/rdesktop 6 SMB/NMBD 7 mDNSResponder (Bounjour/Rendezvous/ZeroConf) 8 UPNP ident lookups ident is the TCP identification service. It allows a remote host to determine the local username associated with any TCP connection involving that remote host. Naturally this is a concern, especially if your username reveals your true identity. So when do ident lookups happen? Well technically your machine's ident server will answer any request for a (server, client) port pair for which the destination IP is the same as the ident request source IP. However, normally is only used with FTP, SMTP and IRC traffic, if that. Some web and ssh servers also have it enabled. The best thing to do here is to kill your ident server, or