IP address investigation playbook

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Who holds an IP, what it exposes and what runs next to it, without scanning it

intermediateabout ip address5 toolslicence CC-BY-4.0
Contents 5/5
  1. 1 IP investigation playbook
  2. 2 Scope and legal
  3. 3 Who holds the address
  4. 4 What it exposes
  5. 5 Ranges and neighbours
Tools (5)

Tools used in this guide

  • ipwhois Looks up who holds an IP address through RDAP: network, ASN, organisation and contactsot install osintverse-community/ipwhois
  • cdncheck Tells whether an IP or host is behind a CDN, cloud provider or WAF, and which oneot install osintverse-community/cdncheck
  • naabu Lists an IP's open ports passively from Shodan InternetDB, without scanning itot install osintverse-community/naabu
  • shodan-host Shows what Shodan has seen on an IP: open ports, services, banners, vulnerabilities, locationot install osintverse-community/shodan-host
  • mapcidr Expands, counts, splits and aggregates IP ranges in CIDR notationot install osintverse-community/mapcidr

Install them all:

ot guide tools osintverse-community/ip-investigation

Ranges and neighbours

Organisations with their own address space (an ASN of their own, a /24 registered to them) usually put related systems close together.

Work with the range

ot run osintverse-community/mapcidr --cidr 192.0.2.0/28

mapcidr expands a range into its addresses, and with its other options counts, splits or aggregates ranges. Use it to turn the block from ownership into a list you can look up one by one with the passive tools in exposure.

Neighbours

  • Addresses in the same block registered to the same organisation are likely theirs.
  • In shared hosting blocks, neighbours are unrelated customers; do not attribute them.
  • Certificates and host names found on neighbours (step 3) confirm or rule out a link.

Wrap-up

Record for each address: holder and ASN, whether it is an intermediary (CDN, cloud), the services seen with their dates, and the domains it leads to. Continue with those domains in the domain playbook.

Published 20 Oct 2026. Read it in a terminal: ot guide read osintverse-community/ip-investigation; offline: ot guide get osintverse-community/ip-investigation · Source · Markdown

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