How to Find Real IP (Origin) address of Website?

Have you done the necessary to ensure your website’s origin IP is not exposed?

Protecting the real IP address of a website is essential to prevent DDoS attacks.

There are multiple ways to find out the website’s IP address like Domain into IP or DNS records lookup. However, if you are using cloud-based security, proxy, or DNS based service, then it’s a little tricky to get the actual IP. But it’s difficult, not impossible.

Let’s find out…

If your website is behind Cloudflare and can’t find the real IP then you can refer here.

Censys

Censys search engine allows the researcher to find how websites are deployed with possible to reveal the IP address as well. It’s an exciting tool to find out not just the IP but many other things, including following.

• IP address
• Hosting Provider
• Server Location
• HTTP Status Code
• Alexa rank
• Public Protocols
• SSL Certificate

I was able to find the real IP address of one of my sites which is on shared hosting.

Shodan

Analyze how your site is connected to the Internet and the origin IP address. Here is the quick result of my lab site and as you can see the IP address in the result 🙂

Shodan can also help the business owner to find out how and where your product is being used. Its good to perform market intelligence study.

IVRE

IVRE is an open-source network reconnaissance framework. It is made with some of the popular tools like Nmap, Zmap, Bro, p0f, Masscan. It’s Docker ready to get you started faster.

Results can be analyzed using the web interface, CLI, or Python API. You can sort, filter to get the information you want. IVRE comes with network flow analysis.

Great, isn’t it?

Zoomeye

A cybersecurity search engine – Zoomeye leverage Xmap and Wmap to identify the services and hosting IP details.

The search result is clean and gives a lot of information like the following.

• Site type
• Web server behind the site
• Port
• HTTP header
• Traffic flow to the origin
• Vulnerability

Zoomeye was able to detect origin IP of a site behind Cloudflare, which is hosted on Google Cloud. Amazing!

SecurityTrails

As the name suggests, SecurityTrails let you find out current and historical data of A, AAAA, MX, NS, SOA, and TXT records. This can be handy to find out the real server’s IP when the website was running directly on the server’s IP and later was moved to CDN or cloud-based security provider.

Find Virtual Hosts

Find Virtual Hosts by Pentest-Tools will be helpful when you are looking to find the websites configured on a single IP.

They are discovered using a public search engine, DNS resolution, and searching for SSL certificates.

Conclusion

You see, there are tools to help in finding the origin IP address. These tools can be handy for a security researcher/expert to plan to protect real IP addresses and prevent DDoS and other vulnerability attacks.