How to retrieve an IP address
- How to retrieve an IP address? How do you find someone’s IP address on the Internet?
These questions are often asked, and few people understand how easy it is to retrieve an IP address from a remote computer.How to retrieve an IP address using the usual services
To recover an IP address, there are different more or less functional techniques. We all send e-mails, sometimes even daily, but did you know that the sender’s IP address is (sometimes) transmitted with the message?
When you receive an email, you can usually click ” Show original ” or ” Show message source ” depending on your email client to view the IP address of the sender of that message.
In the screenshot above, we see the “message source” which reveals the IP address of the sender. And for once, we observe that it is phishing pretending to be health insurance because the IP address in question is known to spam. In addition, it comes from a domain that does not authorize this IP address, and all the signs of which prove that it is a spoof ( dmarc =none, dkim=none, SPF soft fail ). Implied: no authentication of the owner, no digital signature of authorization from ameli.fr, and IP address not authorized by ameli.fr.
Does one wonder how the email did not arrive in spam with so many problems?
Well, it was in spam.
The same thing (IP address technical sharing) happens when you “chat” with someone via software like Skype because the program needs to know both IP addresses in order to allow remote communication. This is the case with instant messaging software which uses the IP address of each party.
Note: this is no longer true today because Skype has changed its architecture to precisely avoid this. Skype Resolvers are the tools that allow you to find an IP address from a Skype ID. These tools use different techniques for this. I don’t know if it still works, but I recommend that you be careful when using them.
What software to recover an IP address?
We have just talked about Skype Resolvers dedicated to Skype software, whose operation is not guaranteed.
That said, more general software like TcpView (alternatives to find for Mac and Linux) allows you to see all active network connections in real-time, sorted by programs. But for this, there must be a direct connection between the two communicating PCs. More and more programs secure communications to avoid this… yes… of course it is practical to recover the IP address of others, but no one wants us to recover their own IP address…
This method is therefore nowadays less and less reliable… itself too. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work!
Finally, the same thing also happens when you post a message on a given forum or site, most of the time your IP address is recorded with your message. Even if she is not visible with this one publicly. This is where the biggest IP address recoveries are made on a daily basis, in complete transparency. That is to say that any site can, with a simple PHP variable for example ($_SERVER[“REMOTE_ADDR”]) retrieve the IP address of visitors.
In short, there are many ways to obtain a given IP address, and your own IP address is “processed/stored” by many of the sites you visit every day. This is how the web works.
And it is by knowing this that you can take advantage of it to harvest IP addresses on demand.
How to find an IP address for sure
I haven’t talked about it yet, but it follows directly from what we have just seen:
There are specialized services for finding IP addresses, such as the Grabify site which allows you to retrieve a specific IP address in a stable and easy way.
