Integrate Tor Detection Directly In Your Site!
More than 2 million people use the Tor network each day to anonymously make connections online. Surprisingly, over 98% of Tor traffic is directed towards public websites, rather than hidden sites that can only be reached by the Tor network. Since Tor can mask a user's real identity online, including their location, they are often used for malicious actions online.
Detecting Tor IP addresses is only a part of the battle against fraud. IPQS proxy detection makes it easy to check if an IP address is a Tor connection or an active proxy or VPN connection. IPQS makes it easy to detect high risk IPs.
Want to add Tor detection to your site? Upload a CSV file with IP addresses or view the proxy detection API documentation to get started.
Is Proxy Detection Right For You?Tor detection is accurate for any country and includes detection for IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses.
Recent Tor Detection Tests
What is Tor?
Connections through Tor are powered by the Tor Network. Tor IP addresses are tunneled through other devices on the Tor network with "Onion Routing". This prevents a user's real IP address from being exposed and instead proxies a request through other Tor devices. To accomplish this, requests you make online through the Tor browser or network are encrypted and then routed across different servers, anonymizing the requests you make online. This process tends to add some latency to page loading times at the tradeoff of staying anonymous. Lastly, Tor can also host hidden websites that can only be accessed through their network.
Are Tor Connections Bad?
Tor connections do have a bad reputation, but are not necessarily bad. Internet users may want to browse the web anonymously without allowing their government, ISP, or even the website they are browsing to view their IP address or browsing habits. It's no surprise that Tor is very popular with journalists and residents of less tolerant governments. However, many hackers and cybercriminals also use the Tor network to conceal their identity and engage in malicious behavior. More often than not, Tor IP addresses are bad news. Common examples of abuse from Tor connections are scraping content, using stolen credit cards, phishing, creating fake accounts, and even hacking.
How to Detect Tor IP Addresses?
IPQS monitors all IP addresses that are active within the Tor network. Searching an IP address above will determine if the IP address is a Tor node or Tor exit. This list updates every few seconds to include the latest Tor connections. Tor detection can also be achieved by using a real-time API query to our proxy detection service or analyzing a CSV file with IP addresses.
What is a Tor Exit Node?
As traffic leaves Tor's "Onion Routing" feature, the traffic must exit through another connection, usually a web server. One drawback of the Tor network, is that this web server can monitor the traffic that is being routed through it, but it's very hard for one entity to control many active tor exits since so many are available. The Tor exit server's IP address is what a website or company would see when a Tor user visits their website or makes a purchase online.
