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Find the Owner of an IP Address

By Bradley Mitchell, About.com

Every public IP address used on the Internet is registered to an owner. The owner may be an individual or a representative of a larger organization (such as an Internet service provider).

WHOIS

The WHOIS database tracks the owners of public IP addresses on the Internet. For a given IP address, you can query the database for the following information:

  • Owner name and contact telephone number
  • Dates of registration
  • List of other IP addresses in that range with the same owner
  • List of DNS servers associated with that IP range
Various WHOIS lookup services are available online.

Read more - WHOIS Lookups

Private and Other Reserved IP Addresses

Some IP address ranges are reserved for use on private networks or for Internet research. Attempting to look up these addresses in WHOIS will return an owner such as Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). However, these same addresses are actually employed on many different home and business networks worldwide.

To find the owner of a private IP address within an organization, contact a system administrator for their network.

Read more - Private IP Address Ranges

Bradley Mitchell
Guide since 1999

Bradley Mitchell
Wireless / Networking Guide

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