Is ifconfig.me legit or a scam?
Legitimate developer tool for IP lookup, registered 2010, widely trusted in tech communities despite one sandbox evasion flag.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site. See full visual analysis →
Visual Screenshot Analysis
We capture a fresh screenshot of the live page and ask a vision model to look for scam visual patterns — fake trust badges, countdown timers, overlay pop-ups, and visual clones of legitimate brands.
Visual red flags detected in the screenshot
The screenshot shows a fully-rendered, minimal IP-lookup utility page with no scam indicators; the layout and content are consistent with the known ifconfig.me developer tool.
What our vision model saw
3 signalsPage displays a standard IP address lookup utility (ifconfig.me) showing connection metadata in a clean table layout — consistent with a legitimate developer tool.
No trust badges, urgency timers, or suspicious overlays present.
No forms requesting sensitive credentials, wallet seeds, or payment information visible.
MT Intelligence
ifconfig.me is a genuine utility service for retrieving public IP addresses and connection metadata via curl or browser. The domain was registered in April 2010 and remains active with a 2027 expiry, placing it among the oldest and most stable services of its kind. Our antivirus network reports zero detections across 92 engines, and the page displays no phishing, malware, or credential-harvesting indicators. The site is frequently recommended on Hacker News, Apple Discussions, and developer forums for its simplicity and reliability. One ANY.RUN sandbox report tagged it as 'malicious activity' with an 'evasion' label; however, this appears to be a false positive stemming from the site's legitimate use in security tooling and malware analysis workflows — attackers routinely query ifconfig.me to discover external IP addresses during reconnaissance, which can trigger sandbox heuristics. Multiple independent trust checkers rate it safe with high scores, and no user complaints or scam reports exist.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for ifconfig.me, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain registered on 2010-04-18 (over 16 years old), expires 2027-04-18, registrar GoDaddy with privacy via Domains By Proxy.
- Widely used and recommended in developer, sysadmin, and Linux communities for simple public IP lookup via curl ifconfig.me or curl ifconfig.me/ip.
- Page displays visitor's IP, user agent, forwarded IPs, and supports multiple endpoints (JSON, /ua, /port, etc.); promotes IPinfo.io for advanced geolocation API.
- No company name, contact details, privacy policy, or legal pages visibly mentioned on the site.
- Listed in security contexts as a common endpoint malware uses for external IP discovery during reconnaissance.
- One sandbox report (ANY.RUN, 2024) flags the domain with "malicious activity" and "evasion" tag; however, multiple trust checkers rate it safe/low-risk with high trust scores.
- No user complaints, scam reports, or fraud mentions found on Reddit, Trustpilot, or review sites; occasional discussions about IPv6 changes or temporary outages.
- ANY.RUNopen
"Online sandbox report for ifconfig.me, tagged as evasion, verdict: Malicious activity."
- Apple Discussionsopen
"To be clear, I see nothing suspicious about this site. ... The risk from ifconfig.me is even lower."
- Scamadviseropen
"ifconfig.me has an average to good trust score. ... Trust Score 100."
- Gridinsoftopen
"Is ifconfig.me safe? Yes, ifconfig.me appears to be low-risk based on current analysis. No major malware or phishing threats were detected."
- Hacker Newsopen
"ifconfig.me is a similar service which I often use. It has a nice feature that if you do "curl ifconfig.me", you'll get only a string with the ip address, no markup."
Registered 2010-04-18 via GoDaddy.com, LLC; expires 2027-04-18; registrant hidden behind Domains By Proxy, LLC (Arizona, US); name servers on Google Domains.
Our research found one sandbox report (ANY.RUN, 2024) tagging ifconfig.me with 'malicious activity' and 'evasion' — a false positive likely triggered by the site's known use in security tooling and malware reconnaissance workflows. In contrast, four independent sources confirm the site's legitimacy: Apple Discussions states 'I see nothing suspicious about this site'; independent trust aggregators assign it a score of 100/100; Gridinsoft reports 'No major malware or phishing threats detected'; and Hacker News users frequently recommend it as a reliable utility for IP lookup via curl. The domain was registered in 2010 and remains active with no user complaints, scam reports, or fraud mentions found on Reddit, Trustpilot, or review sites.
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- Phone number listed (104.243.34.45).
- Postal address visible on the page.
Domain & Encryption
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on ifconfig.me and not a lookalike like i-fconfig.me.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on ifconfig.me. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- ifconfig.me passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 88/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. ifconfig.me presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Let's Encrypt · R13, expiring in 66 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report ifconfig.me as clean.
- No. ifconfig.me is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- ifconfig.me resolves to an IP operated by Google LLC in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- Yes. ifconfig.me sits in the global top-100k on Cloudflare Radar, which means it has substantial real-world traffic. That does not automatically make it safe, but established brands almost always rank here and throwaway scam domains almost never do.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on June 18, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around ifconfig.me have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
User reviews & comments(0)
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