How To Trace An IP Address
Published: 2019-06-19 01:48:35

IP addresses are the addressing system used on the internet. _DR Soft_ mentions that IP addresses are the same as physical addresses and that someone who knows a person&#39;s IP address can [consistently locate](https://www.drsoft.com/2019/01/15/how-do-ip-addresses-work-ip-addresses-clearly-explained/) the geographical region the address came from. Tracing IP addresses usually means jumping through a few hoops to get to the final origination point.

There are IP addresses that you can&#39;t trace online, however. Users who utilize a VPN (like [Opera VPN](https://vpn-review.com/opera-vpn/), for example) are untraceable by any means. Similarly, users who use the TOR browser can&#39;t be traced back to where their connection comes from, because of the sheer amount of IP&#39;s the link is sent through before appearing at the other end. It doesn&#39;t take a world-class hacker to trace an IP, and most users that have basic competency can try tracing the IP of websites just to see how someone can perform a trace.

**Why Trace an IP Address?**

The internet makes it relatively easy to harass someone anonymously. In the recent past, it was a simple matter of tracing an email back to its source, but the modern system makes it a lot harder for those who want to find out who&#39;s on the other end of a bit of communication. Additionally, IP tracing can be useful if you notice something that you should report to the police in a particular geographical region. ISPs usually never give away information about their clients, and a person typically needs a subpoena to extract that information from them. Sadly, this can take a long time, and it&#39;s far easier just to trace the IP since, in the case of many crimes, time is of the essence.

**Potential Errors in IP Tracing**

As mentioned before, users that route their connection through the TOR network tend to be hard to track because the last IP address they broadcast has absolutely nothing to do with their physical location. While it&#39;s simple to find the physical location of the IP, their actual site might be in a completely different city or even continent. Any skilled enough user can route their connection through proxies to hide their geographical position. _Varonis_ defines a [proxy server](https://www.varonis.com/blog/what-is-a-proxy-server/) as a gateway between a user and the internet that offer different levels of security and privacy.

IP Tracing is also impossible if the user employs a virtual private network (VPN) service. _Norton_ mentions that VPN&#39;s [masks the IP](https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-privacy-what-is-a-vpn.html) of a user&#39;s computer. For geographical tracking, we need the IP address of the originating machine or else we won&#39;t be able to find where the signal is broadcasting from. Either of these situations can give false reports or no results at all.

**Tracing an IP**

The first thing that we need to locate an IP is the IP itself. A DNS server is typically used to translate a typed website into an IP address, so if we&#39;re trying to trace a website, we can get the website name and do a lookup on the site. The process for this on a Windows device is simple:

- Open a command line prompt by pressing the Windows Key and R, and typing &quot;cmd&quot; without the quotes
- In the screen that pops up, we&#39;ll use the ping command to get the IP of the website. We&#39;ll enter &quot;ping \&lt;website\_name\&gt;&quot; without the quotes where we substitute the website name as necessary
- The resulting readout shows us an IP address and how long the packet we sent took to reach there. That IP address is the address of the site in question.

If we want to double check that this is indeed the site we&#39;re dealing with, we can copy the IP address and paste it in the address bar of a browser. If the website that loads is the one we&#39;re dealing with, we have successfully found our IP address.

Now we can go a step further and locate where in the world the IP address originates. For this, we can utilize a geolocation service to trace the IP address to where it comes from. Googling an IP Location Finder will give a few results that we can plug our IP into. The site will then give us an approximate location for the originating IP.

**What This Means for You**

If you can so easily trace the IP of a website back to where it&#39;s from, imagine how easy it would be for someone who gets your IP to find where you are, physically? Privacy and security require being aware of the threats. When you connect to a website, your PC broadcasts your unsecured IP across a public network to the site that you&#39;re visiting. Anyone could intercept that IP and then trace it to find out where you are and possibly use that against you. Take precautions when browsing online. Put your safety first.