How do some tools give Personally Identifiable Information like for ex – Company names of website visitors going on a specific website? They claim to so it with reverse IP lookup.
In: Other
Companies who want to act like service providers have to *buy* an IP range.
That makes sense for, say, AT&T, since they have millions of customers. They had to buy a ton of IP addresses so that each customer can have one. Those IP addresses are registered to AT&T.
But smaller companies can end up like that, too. Maybe the Microsoft Campus doesn’t deal with someone like AT&T or Verizon, maybe they connect to the internet themselves as if Microsoft were an ISP. In that case, Microsoft had to buy a chunk of IP addresses and it’s only legal for them to use those ranges.
So if you hear someone say something like “this Wikipedia article was edited by an IP in the United States Congress range”, that’s what’s going on. It the Capitol acts as its own service provider, had to buy IP addresses, so if you see an IP in that range either something illegal is happening or it must have been a computer using that service provider.
Latest Answers