Why identify cloud provider IPs?
When investigating suspicious network traffic, the first question is often "where is this traffic coming from?" Identifying whether an IP belongs to a major cloud provider like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or a CDN like Cloudflare is critical for incident response, threat assessment, and abuse reporting. Cloud-hosted attacks require different response procedures than attacks from residential ISPs. Tor exit node detection is equally important for understanding whether traffic is being anonymized.
How It Works
- Official IP Range Lists
- All major cloud providers publish their IP ranges as machine-readable JSON files. AWS publishes ip-ranges.json, Google Cloud publishes cloud.json, and Cloudflare publishes its ranges as plain text. This tool downloads these authoritative lists and performs local CIDR matching — no third-party lookups needed.
- CIDR Matching
- IP ranges are expressed in CIDR notation (e.g. 13.227.0.0/16). The tool converts both the target IP and each range prefix to 32-bit integers, applies the subnet mask, and checks for a match. This runs entirely in your browser.
☁️ Cloud IP Identifier — Frequently Asked Questions
Why identify cloud provider IPs?
Knowing which cloud provider hosts an IP is essential for incident response, firewall rules, abuse reporting, and infrastructure mapping. If a malicious IP belongs to AWS, you report abuse to AWS. If traffic comes from Cloudflare, the real origin IP is hidden behind their CDN. Cloud identification also helps verify if services are hosted where they claim to be.
Which cloud providers does the Cloud IP tool identify?
The tool checks IP addresses against known ranges for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, Linode, Vultr, Hetzner, OVH, and other major providers. It uses published IP range lists and WHOIS data to make identifications.
Why is cloud provider detection useful for OSINT?
Knowing which cloud provider hosts an IP helps identify infrastructure ownership, estimate operational costs, determine geographic constraints, and assess whether traffic originates from legitimate hosting versus residential networks.