Making a query such as one in the example will show results from hosts that are using the ip address that matches the query. The search query is straight forward to use. Of the major search engines, Bing is the only service to offer a search query that resolves hostnames from an IP address.Ī few years ago this was a popular method for finding virtual web hosts from an IP address. There are usually not many reasons to use Bing, however, the Bing reverse IP search is sometimes one. Registered members can get up to 500'000 results from a single query using the web form or 10 million using the API (see below). Search hosts across up to a /24 of public IP addresses.įree users are limited by the number of results. Not only can you use the Reverse IP lookup to find web hosts on a single IP address, the query can also be performed against a CIDR network block. Potentially bypassing the security controls of the target site. If for example, your primary target web site appears to be secure, you may be able to gain access to the underlying operating system by attacking a less secure site on the same server. It is also common in many organizations and can be an excellent way to expand the attack surface during reconnaissance of a web server.

This is a common technique in shared hosting environments. The technique known as Reverse IP Lookup is a way to identify hostnames that have DNS (A) records associated with an IP address.Ī web server can be configured to serve multiple virtual hosts from a single IP address.

Reverse lookup from address