Recently, I saw icanhazip.com pop up in my pFsense firewall logs. It was immediately blocked but the name piqued my interest, so I did a little digging which revealed an interesting backstory.
It’s owned by Cloudflare:
spoiler
spoiler
…but it hasn’t always been theirs: icanhazip: How a simple IP address tool survived a deluge of users. Pretty interesting, at least to me as I have never encountered it before.
I have it still blocked as nothing I’m doing seems hampered by blocking icanhazip.com’s ip range. Anyone else ever encounter icanhazip.com?
Lots of people use it, I recommend they try ifconfig.co - cleaner curl output.
Interestingly enough, ifconfig.co shows up too. I knew about ifconfig.co tho. Since the last container I added was SpeedTest Tracker to replace OpenSpeedTest, and that’s about the time icanhazip.com showed up, I am assuming SpeedTest Tracker is using both ifconfig.co and icanhazip.com to determine the
localexternal IP and the closest test servers to it. The request is originating from the LAN. However, I selected my own servers I wanted to use based on my locale, so blocking either hasn’t stopped SpeedTest Tracker from doing it’s tests on an hourly basis.