Reveal the real IP address of a website behind CloudFlare
This tutorial is 100% for Education Purpose only. Any time the word “Hacking” that is used on this site shall be regarded as Ethical Hacking. Do not attempt to violate the law with anything contained here. If you planned to use the content for illegal purposes, then please leave this site immediately! We will not be responsible for any illegal actions.
In this tutorial, we will use a simple website built specifically for testing purposes. and we will try to find as many information as possible from this website.
We will try to find as many information as possible from this website.
PS: This website is hiding in CloudFlare so that the attacker will not be able to know its real IP address of their server.
A little bit of what is CloudFlare…
In the early days of internet, we there is a request to load a website, the request will go from the computer to the server.
But, if too many requests came in at the same time, the server could be overwhelmed and crash, becoming unresponsive to anyone trying to access the resources it hosted. — That’s why we often face issue Server Down when trying to access a website
And that is where CloudFlare comes in
Cloudflare was created to ease these difficulties and empower users with the resources to make their sites, apps, and blogs safe and performant. This is done through the use of a powerful edge network that provides content and other services as close to you as possible, so you get the information as fast as possible. — cloudflare.com
CloudFlare is a network of data centers that sits between your web server and the rest of the internet.
CloudFlare also provides a reverse proxy service which makes the websites be very difficult or even impossible for someone on the outside to figure out who the hosting provider is that’s originating the website. This makes it possible for content owners to remain anonymous and hide the origin IP address of their web server to protect the originating server from attacks.
Then how to get the real IP address ??
It turns out we still have some techniques to reveal the IP Address even if its hiding in the CloudFlare.
Before we jump into the techniques, we need to know and understand how the website is actually process the requests coming in and out.
This is an illustration of how actually our requests to the website is proceed.
First, our request will go to the CloudFlare, then will be forwarded to the server.
And if we know the Real IP Address, we will be able to access it directly without going through CloudFlare anymore.
There are several tools to find information behind the Cloud Flare, such as:
Let’s discuss one of them…
Shodan
Visit this website, then you would be able to see this on your screen.
Type the Domain of the target website
And here are the results!!
Now we found it’s REAL IP ADDRESS !
In the next article, we will discuss how we can use this REAL IP ADDRESS to gather some more information from the server!
Thanks!
I hope you learn something new from this article :)
See you on the next articles !!
Interesting related topics to explore
~ Hengky Sanjaya
