You can trace but you are going to get an geographic area.  Those traced are thraced with the assistence of the ISP.  The ISP handles the allocation of IP addresses and "knows" who has what address.  If it is a customer of theirs, they know who that customer is and probably have a mailing address for the person.  IF you have the IP address, you can use a utility like visual trace rout to see about where the address is.  You will definitely get a country and may get it narrowed down by as much as a state or even city. 

For those of you wondering if the opcode db is ever going to come back online, there is one out by the guys that brought us Backtrack.  You can find it at http://www.exploit-db.com .   Enjoy.

Edit:
Sorry, I spent a little more time looking at it.  It is a far cleaner version of milw0rm.  I'm still looking for a good opcode db.

I hope you relaese the results back here.  Good luck with the survey.

As far as email goes, you could try having a read response sent to you.  Of course that does ask before sending a reply though.  There are ways around that like the service provided by readreply.com. 

I would go with one of Kev' suggestions.  Personally, I would go with email though.  When an email is sent, it has a header field that is added to every time it passes through a mail server.  There are ways to get a read reciept from the user without there knowing.  That response will have the target IP address.

You could potentially backtrack the IP address used.  IF the person that did the hack was smart, then he routed it through a tor to be on the safe side.  You may not get what you are looking for going that route.  I would suggest contacting your ISP since most have a policy against even doing a port scan and have them investigate.

awesec,

I'm still waiting as well.

Like both Dengar and Ketchupo mentioned, there is more than one way to go about this.  There are really two main approaches though: from the inside (You already have access to the network) or frmo the outside (You don't have access).  Use your imagination and go from there.  Oh, and read the book mention before to get a feel from where you are and where to go. Good luck.

Thanks Laz3r for the links.  I may follow your web test lab setup.  We don't do a lot of web app pentesting, but it is an integral part of a pentest. Thanks.

I'm lucky with my lab setup.  I have a lab at the office that we can use to practice with as well as at home.  My home lab has a couple of physical boxes.  One box is my game rig so I don't do too much with it, but my other box is my test bed system.  I use it to play with.  I have run every thing form Solaris 10 to Ubuntu to Server 08.  I have VMWare Server (Free) on my game rig since it has the most RAM and I can beef it up.  I use VMs for OSes that I don't want to rebuild or reinstall.  Unfortuneately, I don't have anything good for Cisco at the house.

My office lab has every thing in it or darn near.  I have three servers to hos VMs.  I have several SPARC platforms for various versions of Solaris.  I also have ISO files for various LiveCDs that can be run in a VM that have known vulnerabilities in them. 

Your lab is only limited by your imagination.  Have fun with it.  There are plenty of free tools out there like Sun Vitual box, Microsoft Virtual PC, and VMWare Server.  You can download pre-built VMs form the VMWare site.  Most Linux distros are free or there is a free version.  Good luck.

I agree with Kami,

The course is a great course and covers the entire range of a pentest.  It goes into every thing form doing your recon to gaining access.  There is also a bit on exploit development.  There is a thread here about the skills of a hacker and the OffSec course covers them. 

Welcome to the forum.

Look at the Forfront Security Center from MS if you are looking to stick with an all MS solution.  It can do the checking when a system logs in and send it to a remediation server if it finds patches missing.

http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/en/us/default.aspx

You can also check out readnotify.  Your friends could use a service like this to track where the email goes.

http://readnotify.com/

Thanks Don for all the work.  Like the others here, I am happy to help out where ever needed.

I would like the OpcodeDB to come back online. 

I would also like to see it not go the way of Nessus.  We'll have to watch and see.