Why is it bad for someone to have your ip address? What can they do with this information?
In: 76
It’s not bad. It’s like how people blur out license plates. Your IP is meaningless to most people and at worst it can give out your approximate location (usually an entire city at best)
You know those scambaiting videos where they coax the scammer into clicking a link that reveals their IP? All they’re telling from that is what country the scammer is in, to prove they’re not in America or wherever they claim to be located. That’s it. The ones who can reveal an active building where they’re located are doing it differently, because they’ve gotten access to the scammer’s computer and can check the Wi-Fi connections around them.
Here, [try it yourself](https://iplocation.com/)
That’s all anyone is able to find from your IP address.
Now, say you piss someone off in a video game. They can start sending ping requests to your IP, from multiple different computers at once, this is known as a dynamic denial of service attack or DDOS. The goal is to break your internet connection by overloading your router, as it would try to reply to all the requests.
These days, most competent routers have mitigation for this sort of thing. So unless you’re browsing the internet with a router that’s got its firewall disabled, you really don’t need to worry about it. It’s one of those things movies love to play up as if finding someone’s IP makes you an expert hacker.
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