What is a IP lookup tool?
A lookup tool to locate IP, provides the exact location information of an IP address. If you already know the IP address, you can instantly find out the city, state, zip code and country of an IP address.
An IP is your virtual address. Every device connected to the internet has an IP address assigned to it, which reveals its geolocation. When trying to track users IP, people may know details of your location. IP addresses help data find its destination and reach its intended online recipient.
The IP location may vary, and the result only shows an approximate location.
An IP locator does not provide personally identifiable information such as name, email address, telephone number, exact home address, etc.
Who owns the IP address?
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) maintains and distributes IP addresses. This organization distributes IP addresses to various companies and organizations, which in turn assign them to their customers. However, they still retain their property.
Is it illegal to look up someone’s IP address?
IP addresses are publicly available and do not identify personal information, so checking someone’s IP address and using an IP lookup tool is legal.
What is the difference between IP lookup, IP checker and IP locator?
None. Although their names are different, they are exactly the same tool, and are designed to find your IP address and geolocation, as well as detect the ISP associated with your IP address.
What is reverse IP lookup?
Reverse IP Finder allows you to find all domains associated with a specific IP address. For example, you can check what other websites are stored on the server you use to avoid bad neighbors. Reverse IP lookup is also useful to find out how many websites are stored on the servers in order to avoid overcrowded web hosting.
Is this IP verification tool free?
The IP lookup tool is completely free and you can use it however you like. IP addresses are publicly available, so any Internet user has the right to verify them.
IP address location: understand how tracking can be done and what is myth
In specific situations, this issue appears in the case of Júlia, who is receiving unwanted messages via WhatsApp and sent a series of questions to find out if it is possible to trace the origin of the communication.
This is also the case for another reader, who wants to help his mother find out who might have hacked into her account after the account provider sent an alert reporting a login from a different city.
As a general rule, the IP address is a poor identifier, both for location and for specific individuals.
Most of the information useful for tracking a message will depend on court orders and the cooperation of access and enforcement providers.
In addition, you may receive false alerts about “unknown locations” due to inaccuracies in tools that estimate IP address locations .If you want to get to the bottom of it – and understand the relationship between IMEI, IP, MAC and your privacy – see below how it all works.
After all, what is the IP address?
“IP” is the acronym for “Internet Protocol”.
The address of this protocol is a number assigned to each computer connected to a network.
It’s not much different from a phone number, and there are even IP addresses that are similar to telephone extensions – they only work on the internet through a “switchboard”.
IP addresses that don’t work on the internet are technically called “private”, but many users refer to them as “fake IPs” – they are “fake” in the sense that the internet will only see from the access center, which is “
This configuration is common in any network where multiple devices (cell phone, TV, computers) are connected to the internet by a single IP address.
When the same Wi-Fi network is shared by several people, for example, it is possible that the internet only sees the router address of the owner of the connection. For the internet, it is as if all connected devices were one.
It is also possible to have more than one IP address at the same time. This is quite common on mobile: if you are connected to Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G network, each connection will assign an IP address to your mobile. As they are two different networks, each network assigns an address.
In this way, the IP address is a number that establishes the relationship of a device and a network it has connected to.
There is no fixed relationship between an IP address and a person or a place, but the internet provider that assigned that address.
How are IP addresses associated with cities?
Virtually any internet service – whether Facebook , Microsoft or Google , just to name a few – specifies an estimated location of hits based on IP address.
But if there is no relationship between IP and location, how is this possible?
The keyword is ” estimate “. It is a myth that the IP address always refers to a specific computer or location.
Fernando Amatte, director of the Red Team for Latin America at the digital security company Cipher, explains that IP addresses are distributed worldwide by the IANA (acronym in English for “authority for the assignment of internet numbers”)
The IANA reserves number ranges, or “address blocks”, for certain countries.
Each country has its own authority to redistribute addresses – in the case of Brazil, it is the Information and Coordination Center of Ponto BR (NIC.br).
In this way, it is possible to estimate a “rough” location from the IPs associated with each country by the IANA. But this does not help to estimate the precise location of users.
To do this, there are companies that specialize in matching IP addresses and location.
This information can be obtained from a variety of sources – from mappings obtained from providers to data collected from devices.
See examples:
– If you share your GPS location data on your cell phone with a website, the page will be able to accurately associate your location and the IP address you received from the provider
– In some cases, data such as a customer’s address in a store can be associated with the IP of the purchase to feed this data.
Many providers, even operating nationally, reserve IP address blocks for cities or neighborhoods – not for any technical limitation, but for the convenience of configuration.
The location data collected helps to understand this relationship created by the providers, allowing to estimate the location of who is using a specific IP address.
However, there is great variation over time. Amatte points out that there are more devices than IP addresses available, which means that there is a “turn around” in the use of these addresses . With this constant exchange, the data can become out of date.
As a result, these location estimates can be inaccurate, missing by up to thousands of kilometers. Any location estimates that do not rely on official provider data should be interpreted with caution.
“The only way for you to know exactly who is in which place – and that’s what the police use – is through the providers . If a crime happens, the lawyer, the police or someone has to ask the service provider for that, and it will tell you who was connected at that time and on that IP”, explains Amatte.
How can wrong location estimates hurt me?
The biggest risk is that you assume that your social network or email account has been hacked because the provider has detected an alleged access from a different location.
In fact, this different location could have been detected after a change in your provider’s configuration or because you used a different network than yours – a public Wi-Fi, for example.
It is a myth that an access from an unknown IP-based location always means that your account has been accessed by a third party.
In an extreme situation, just walking down the street with the cell phone’s Wi-Fi turned on so that “suspicious” accesses, from many different cities, are detected by the service.
Every Wi-Fi network your phone connects to has the potential to record a new location – even if it was all initiated by your own smartphone.
If you rely heavily on a service, it is not recommended to access it from alternate networks frequently . This tends to confuse security systems used to detect suspicious logins.
How can an IP address identify a person?
As the IP address identifies the ISP, it is he who owns the subscriber’s data. Although the IP address changes with each connection, ISPs are required by law to keep the connection history.That is, the provider knows all the IPs that a subscriber has already used, at each date and time.
It is possible to request to the Court that the internet provider inform the registration data of the subscriber who used a specific IP address at a specific date and time.
If the connection is identified by a Wi-Fi network or another intermediary, such as a company or an Internet café, other measures can be taken to help identify the person responsible: security cameras, employee records, payment details, and so on.
In the event of a crime, it is the police authority who must decide the best way to proceed with the screening.
Although this is the best way to proceed, it also does not solve all cases.
Amatte, from Cipher, recalls that there may be gaps in providers’ records and that very long and irregular Wi-Fi networks – created by equipment without approval that does not respect the power limit – can allow a connection to occur from a distant location. registered by the provider. “From this information, it’s a little ant’s work”, illustrates the specialist.
Can I get the IP address of a message?
Most of the time, you won’t have this information directly. Court intervention will be required.
Almost all communications on the Internet go through intermediaries. This is how a message you send to a person who is not connected can reach them even if they access the service when you have already disconnected your phone.
In the meantime, the message is in an intermediary, who can deliver the mail at any time.
In this way, your device (phone or computer) will only have access to the IP address of the service used and not the user’s, as there was no direct connection.
The social network or messaging service will have to inform the IP address of the user who sent a message or published the content, which will only happen with a court order.
If you want to obtain the IP of a person without the involvement of the Justice, you will have to use subterfuges, such as links or hidden images in emails, which generate direct access to a computer that you control and that can record that access.
But even that can be difficult as there are security measures in place to prevent this scenario. But even with the IP, you still won’t know who she is or where she is.
What is MAC address? Does it help with tracking?
The MAC (“Media Access Control”) is a physical address for local connections. Many people are mistaken about the usefulness of the MAC, because it is considered a “device identifier”.
That is, each connecting device has a unique and fixed MAC address. On that side, it looks like it would be excellent for identifying people on the internet.
The reality is practically the opposite of that. The MAC address is not propagated to the internet – it is local, and only serves for the router to identify a computer or smartphone. No website or service receives MAC from devices.
Also, for privacy reasons, it is not uncommon for systems to include a tweak to randomize the MAC.
The MAC address just needs to be different from the MAC address of other devices connected to the same local network (same Wi-Fi network, for example). Other than that, the same MAC can be used by multiple computers or smartphones at the same time.
In the sphere of security and privacy of networks, MAC enables some attacks on local networks. On the internet, no.
“In a local network, the MAC can make a difference. From the moment something went to the internet, it is already very far from that address. You can’t do anything else with the MAC”, explains Amatte, from Cipher.
It is a myth that MAC is for tracking devices. Anyone who talks about “tracking by MAC” is probably mistaken or talking about very specific circumstances.
What is the IMEI number?
IMEI is similar to MAC, but is used for connections to cellular networks and is therefore more regulated. It is unique, which helps to identify specific devices.
But just like the MAC, the first access point, the operator, is the only one to receive it and it is not forwarded on the connection. As a rule, there is no way to determine the IMEI of a device through applications.
If a message is sent over Wi-Fi from a canceled line, there won’t even be any IMEI involved in the communication.
As only the operator knows the IMEI of the device, it can inform if a certain IMEI is active in its network, for example.
The IMEI can also be registered on a block list to prevent stolen devices from being sold by thieves after the theft. But any attempt to get location is operator dependent.
According to Amatte, a specialist in digital security, “it would take privileged access within the telephone operator to gain some access to the location”. In this way, the IMEI will only be useful for tracking if the operator cooperates.
And, even if the operator cooperates, it is not known how useful this will be. According to Amatte, there are doubts about the possibility of the operator obtaining accurate location information.
Therefore, the subscriber’s data – who need to inform their address to contract the service – can be more useful to reach the person responsible for a communication.
It is a myth that the IMEI alone allows anyone to accurately locate a smartphone or access device data.
As the IMEI helps to identify devices, this number can be used to block connections to the mobile network. It’s useful for preventing stolen devices from making calls or accessing the internet through phone carriers, but other than that, most people will have no use for this number.
What can we understand from all this?
In practice, IP, IMEI and MAC addresses are not used to track someone directly .
In some cases, the IP address may be assigned to a specific company, with an address record and even the name of the person in charge.
If this happens, that company can be directly sued to explain the involvement of your IP address in an illicit or abusive transmission.
But the rule is that the IP is only linked to a provider, which will have to be sued in court to provide information about the subscriber who had that address at a specific time.
Therefore, knowing the time a message was sent or published is as important as knowing the IP address from which it came.There are no miracles to tracking a broadcast or device on the internet using only public information.
What exists are laws that oblige the guarding of the information that makes this tracking possible, and public data – such as information from providers – so that the correct companies can be brought to justice.
