If someone got my IP address; is there anything bad they can do?
Sorry if this question has been asked a gazillion times but I’m worried I might be in danger.
Thanks a million!
Serious Answer: IP address can be used to find a location of your ISP’s nearest node/data center, this could be anywhere from 1km(cities) to 50km(rural) from your actual location. On the networking side your address can be used to send messages to your network, for example they could send many messages overloading your router(DDOS). Worst case scenario they could exploit a bug to take control of parts of your network. Finally they could look through database breaches to find if theres any email/password/etc tied to your IP address.
Your IP address may reveal your approximate location and your provider. Depending on the country, it may also reveal your identity to law enforcement (here in Germany this is used to track down copyright infringements). And it enables somebody to scan for vulnerabilities on your IP for DOS or hacking purposes. If you are behind a dynamic IP, just reconnect and the IP changes.
Hypothetically, maybe. Realistically, no.
With your IP address, your ISP can be identified, and depending on your ISP, your vague region; in some countries, it might be possible to find out the closest big city with the IP address, but that’s it. It is not possible to get the name of the contract holder (e.g. you), find out your address or anything else like that.
Yes and no, just knowing someones IP just gives someone a target for the attack.
What you are essentially asking is can someone break into my house just by knowing where I live?
By not revealing your IP to “threats” its not gonna stop oppurtinistic burglaries from occuring who don’t know its you that lives there, but it will stop “threats” from targeting your house BECAUSE YOU live there. I hope this analogy helps.
On top of this if you use a typical home broadband you actually get one of their IP addresses assigned to you and its dynamic, so it will change. It may change once every week for an example. If we use the same house scenario it would be like you move house every week.
Emphasis on the term “target” your house, once they have the address they only know where they are going, they don’t know how to get in from just an address alone.
hat full ad hoc middle weary steer roll follow scale plough
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This question lacks context. What exactly do you mean by “bad” and by being in danger? If you mean if they can hack you, a lot of ppl already answered that. If you mean if they can find you in real life, then the answer depends on who is the other person. If it is law enforcement they can definitely find you. If it is a random person, most probably they can find till a generic area in your city. If it is a random person but an illegal action by you is involved, then it depends whether this person decides to go the court way so that law enforcement will be involved
Beyond geo-location, which is rarely consistently accurate in and of itself, an ip address alone isn’t much for a normal person.
With NAT ‘firewalls’ (I use that term loosely) - it’s practically impossible to remotely hack someone without a fuck ton of luck on their side.
Now that being said - that doesn’t mean you’re entirely anonymous. ISP’s keep records of IP leases. Emails often have what are called headers which contain a variety of other information.
A header in an email may look something like this:
X-Received: by 2002:a17:90b:1b48:b0:1ef:a90d:eae1 with SMTP id nv8-20020a17090b1b4800b001efa90deae1mr18473609pjb.68.1657558946678; Mon, 11 Jul 2022 10:02:26 -0700 (PDT)
Or it can contain your actual IP address among many other bits of information.
But an IP address alone, in and of itself, is relatively useless for your average person.
Back in the old days… before firewalls were common it was easy to connect to someone’s printer from ICQ, for example, with JUST their IP address. Now? That’s not practical.
They would need to enable remote access, punch a hole through their firewall and point it at the machine, etc.
Now if it were your neighbor and they had a lot of time on their hands then sure, but that’s more than ‘just’ an IP.
Time to make sure you have a good and updated internet router that’s still getting security fixes and patches. And that you have no more weird port forwards or UPnP crap opening ports or whatever. And the router shouldn’t have the admin interface open towards the internet. It shouldn’t have ANYTHING open to the outside.
How much do you trust the passwords you set on your devices including the router and wifi?
Other than that I wouldn’t be too worried really.
Is nobody going to talk about exposed ports attackers will search for using an IP address… ?
Are people even hackers here?..
Yes, an IP address can definitely lead to compromise if you have any listening services on your machine. This could be a web server, an email server, a bit torrent client, etc. The average internet user has literally no idea what a port is, or how they are used or what services are exposed on their machine.
Attackers can run simple nmap port scans, enumerate, attempt to penetrate, escalate.
How did so many people downvote the guy who said “someone can hack you by knowing your ip”? He is right.
Pretty sure like 99% of people here weighing in and downvoting shit are not even hackers.
If you’re behind a router assigned a static IP, hypothetically an attacker outside your network could pwn your router, establish persistence and pwn the rest of your network or use it as a point of indirection in another operation.
Depends what you mean by your IP. The IP on your internal home network? Not much since it’s not a routable IP on the public Internet.
The external interface of your router? That is routable on the public internet, but isn’t really your IP address, it’s the IP address in front of all the devices on your home network. They’d have to hack the router, and then use that to pivot into your home network. This is probably the most likely scenario. As long as your home router has the latest firmware and doesn’t have a vulnerability you’re probably good. They could DDoS your IP, but your ISP may have DDoS mitigation in place which would make this ineffective. It’s also only going to knock you offline for a bit rather than compromise anything.
Do they mean the IP address of the exit node belonging to the VPN provider you’re using? That’s worthless since thousands of others will be sharing the same IP.
Do they mean the external interface of your company’s NAT gateway and firewall? Also not really your IP but a public IP shared by many other people at your place of work.
Try visiting whatsmyip.org to see what someone on the Internet would see when you visit their website or connect to their server. That’s the IP address they think you have. Now go to System Preferences on Mac and Networking to see what your workstation IP address is. Or on Windows go to Start > Settings > Network & internet > Wi-Fi and then select the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to. Under Properties, look for your IP address listed next to IPv4 address. Does that match the IP address that people on the public internet are seeing? Probably not. Then try to figure out what that public IP address is. Is it your home router? Or perhaps your ISP has additional network address translation they’re doing further upstream and it’s one of those routers. Or perhaps you’re using a VPN and it’s the exit node of the VPN. The hostname of your public IP should give you a clue and whatsmyip will give you that.
Hopefully you’re beginning to get the picture. Newbies on the internet who want to sound scary might say things like “I have your IP and I’m coming for you.” but they might have no idea what they have. IPs don’t often uniquely identify individuals online. They more often than not identify groups of computers - and sometimes these are very large groups of computers forming a network behind the public IP that everyone on the public internet sees.
If you want to be a little more anonymous, use a VPN provider. Then if someone tries to scare you telling you that they have your IP address, you’ll know that all they have is an IP address belonging to your VPN provider that thousands of other users are sharing and that’s absolutely worthless in identifying you or trying to attack your home or office network.
Edit: Just want to add a note about anonymity and the ability for law enforcement and others to unmask you. Without a subpoena it’s very difficult for anyone to figure out your identity using just your IP address unless you give it to them accidentally or on purpose. They’d need to hack whatever machine is using your public IP and work their way back to your workstation, which is very hard to do in most cases. With a subpoena, law enforcement can tie your identity to your public IP address quite easily by requesting ISP and VPN provider logs and finding out who was using a public IP at the time. This is done quite frequently world-wide.
There are many other ways to determine someone’s identity without even having their IP address. For example, if you visit a website with a vulnerable browser, and the site launches a browser exploit to compromise your workstation, they can exfiltrate your personal information from your workstation without even knowing or caring what your IP address is.
Could be used as target for DDoS.
Well… Your location and your datas such as social media accounts that have relation with that ip can be leaked.
Hahahaha wow, non-surveillance people seem very naively uninformed about this.
Google uses Android/Maps to combine IP, GPS, cell, and time information and deliver it in a surveillance product to link IP address queries to your actual location within 10 meters or so in most cases.
I used to work for a spyware company that leveraged this to locate people/companies. I’m sure government contractors have access to something at least as good.
The only way around this is to use a cell connection (in which case you can be tracked by CSRLs). Or a VPN (which government contractors can still trace your actual IP through). Or TOR.
So yes, if a determined threat/security actor has your IP, they can know exactly where you are.
The likelihood of you being targeted for an attack based on your IP address is super low. Unless you work for a big company and you are on their network. Or you just pissed off the wrong hacker. But seriously hackers want juicy targets and if they want your IP address all they have to do is scan the network you are on and get it that way. Focus on keeping your patches and computer updated, not clicking on stupid links, and not being a moron with your passwords online and you’ll be fine.
Not too much your geographical location (not accurate)
Your Internet Service Provider
Your data logging,web activities and many i don’t know
If you are from my country ( Romania) they will find out your internet provider , and some random location depending on the internet provider and what random location they choose
Yes. I once made a poor guy rob a bank for me just by having his IP. It’s all thanks to 5g internet. It basically brainwashes the person and connects to their brain.