eli5 what can scammers even do when they get your IP address?
In: 5
Nothing, really. It’s a bit of a myth that your IP address is somehow secret information you need to protect.
In reality, you IP address is something you send to *every website you visit* because you need that website you talk directly to you. And if you don’t give them your address they can’t…do that.
At best a scammer can use to it figure out where you are/who you are and maybe try and target you for specific scams. But that’s not really how they operate, there is no reason to put in the work to target a specific person.
Not a lot. An IP by itself isn’t very useful or even particularly hard to get. A talented hacker could probably cause some headache, but why would they? Talented hackers have better things to do.
Back in the dial up days I used to get people’s IP address over AOL instant messenger and then use a program called “mosucker” to take over their screen
Lol all I gotta do is fire up my gateway and your screen is mine !!
Not sure if that’s even possible anymore but it used to be
Then once they got offline they would have a new IP address when they dialed back up
I wonder if it works still
Usually a modern OS will have a firewall up and block any/all incoming unsolicited traffic. So if they had your IP, they’d also need to have a program running on your machine to receive the traffic on an open port and send data back. They could really only get that if you ran some program you downloaded from an untrusted source.
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