How to track IP address using an Image [6 Easy Steps]

Hello learners, on this guide we will be learning how to track IP address of a person by sending him/her an image. This guide can be used during the reconnaissance process together with social engineering to collect valuable info of our target person. We will also be able to determine the browser and the operating system which the victim is using. We will combine various online tools to enable track ip address.

Requirements

• A PC running on any Operating System.
• An image.(Try understand basics of social engineering to select the best image)
• A web browser compatible with the operating system of your choice.

Having that in mind, we will jump right into our tutorial.

Step 1: Uploading image to image hosting site

The success of this tutorial depends on selecting an image of interest to our target. Through the image we will be able to track the IP address. In our first step, we will be uploading the image to a image hosting website from where the victim will view the image. Once the image has been uploaded, we need to find the exact link to the image. i.e The one in a red box below.

Step 2: Setting up IP logging service

After we have the image ready, we need to attach to it a service from which we can get and track IP address. There are many website offering logging services offline but we will be using Grabify to track IP address. With grabify we will be able to log and track IP address. In addition to that, grabify gets for us some more useful information about our target.i.e.(the browser, the operating system).

Grabify has both paid and free services, but we will use a free package to track IP address to use the grabify service for free. We enter the link to our online hosted image as shown below and click on create URL.

A screen will pop up telling you to agree with the terms of service and privacy policy. You just have to accept and continue but make sure you have read through them to avoid finding yourself on the wrong side of the law.

Step 3: Link information

On this page we have several types of information to help us track IP address.

• Original URL - This is the original URL to your image on the website it is hosted on.
• New URL - This is the URL which we will send to our target in order to obtain information to help us track the IP address.
• Access Link - This is the link we will be using to access the information already logged onto our grabify platform.

Step 4: Concealing the grabify link

Now we have a link we can send to our target to track IP address but a user can be able to detect it is an information fetching link since it has can be traced back to grabify. Our next step is to make it undetectable by the target. To perform this action we will use a free link spoofing service to make it undetectable.

Once you open the website you enter the link on the shortening input box and click on generate a shortened link to get a shorter link as shown on image below.

We now have a undetectable link which once again using social engineering skills we will send to our target and make sure he/she clicks on the link for us to track IP address.

Once the target clicks on the link he/she will see the image as shown below. As shown, the user only sees the image that you sent, he/she did not realize that we are trying to track IP address. Let us now go back to our results console.

Step 5: Viewing the grabbed information

We now access the fetched data using our access URL which was generated in order to view and track IP address. Some of the information we have managed to fetch are as shown on the image below.

We have the date of access, IP address of the victim, country and city where the user accessed, the browser, the operating system, device used, user agent, host name and the ISP. We now move onto next step which is to track IP address.

Step 6: Using fetched information to track IP address

We have the information we needed. Now we will use another online tool to track IP address to its exact location. We will use IP look up website where we enter the target’s IP address to get information such as the exact location on a map for it as shown below.

Conclusion

In the above guide we were able to use our previously learned social engineering skills to get and track IP address of our target. We used various free online tools to come up with a way to track IP address of our target and also managed to obtained useful reconnaissance information.

This is a simple but yet very effective method to use when collecting information on a target. The guide maybe limited when a target uses a VPN as it will fetch the VPN IP address hence we cannot be able to determine the target’s actual location when we track IP address.