An IP netblock can be a critical piece of information for the companies that engage in online activities. Whether it’s for competitor research or to prevent IP address hijacking, IP netblock data allows technology professionals to deduce who owns a group of IP addresses to pursue their objectives and take relevant action from there.

That said, the ability to quickly derive this information could sometimes spell the difference between success and a missed opportunity, or mitigating or not a cybersecurity threat before it can affect one’s systems and networks.

In this post, we’ll discuss how general users and tech-savvy cybersecurity professionals can obtain IP block data by using a variety of online technologies such as IP Netblocks WHOIS Database and others.

Who Assigns IP Netblocks and How Can You Obtain One?

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) oversees the IP address space. It allocates IP addresses to the five regional Internet registries (RIRs), which, in turn, distribute them to local registries. Internet service and hosting providers are often in charge of designating addresses and netblocks to end-users. Your provider can tell you which netblock it assigned to your organization and how many addresses from it are usable.

Common Ways to Identify a Netblock Owner

There are various ways to get an IP address, network block, and the corresponding IP block owner, which include:

• Using a terminal prompt: You can use a command line to query publicly accessible IP addresses assigned to a website or company. However, these commands are somewhat limited in identifying public and local IP addresses used by certain companies and individuals. You’d still have to perform additional calculations and research to retrieve their entire netblock. Also, these may also require some technical background that isn’t available to all users.
• Performing a WHOIS/IP lookup: Users can also rely on WHOIS records to view the IP addresses a website resolves to and potentially determine its netblock owner using its IP range. DNS Lookup API, for instance, can retrieve the IP addresses used by a particular domain. IP Netblocks API can then be used to retrieve the address’s range.
• Using an IP netblocks WHOIS database: Users, both experienced and non-tech-savvy, can also use an IP network intelligence data source. IP Netblocks WHOIS Database combines crawled WHOIS and IP netblock data in a single repository that currently contains 9.1 million IP netblocks with 48,000 ranges updated daily. The well-parsed and normalized data can be processed by various high-level programming languages and read by both relational and nonrelational database applications.

How to Use the IP Netblocks WHOIS Database

You can refer to this post for an in-depth tutorial on how to use our database. You can also view a detailed breakdown of its output here. To give you an idea of how the tool works, the steps below briefly explain how to run a search on the database:

• Input the IP range into the database. As mentioned earlier, you can obtain the range by running a WHOIS or IP netblocks lookup for IP addresses in your firewall logs.
• The database reader processes the request within a few seconds.
• The software can pull up the IP range’s netblocks border, last update date, name, location, technical contacts, maintainers, and more.
• You can use the information for network mapping, cyber investigations, business research, and more. You can download the database via Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

IP Netblocks WHOIS Database is useful for cybersecurity research, threat hunting, and validating alerts from security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Its data points can be integrated into SIEM solutions and other network management tools to augment threat information. It also helps security experts to find out whose network is behind a potentially malicious IP address currently attempting to infiltrate their networks.

The database also aids marketers in customizing offerings for customers, existing and potential alike. Knowing who an IP range’s owner is can help them create a business profile and a corresponding proposal for its owner.

Organizations looking to expand their network can easily find neighboring IP blocks that are available for acquisition with IP Netblocks WHOIS Database as well. Copyrighted content owners can use it to filter out unauthorized users from accessing posted materials. Website owners and administrators can identify where their visitors come from to provide them with better user experience.

Having access to complete and accurate IP netblocks data is crucial in beefing up an organization’s cybersecurity posture, improving marketing and business efforts, protecting intellectual property, and understanding the sources of website traffic.

IP intelligence tools and data sources such as IP Netblocks API and IP Netblocks WHOIS Database allows any type of user to conveniently obtain the netblocks information that corresponds to an IP range for purchase or closer examination.