I am *really* not a computer guy, and this question has kinda been on my mind since I found out about doxxing/IP grabbers ages ago. I didn’t really care too much, since I am not a fan of putting people in danger over twitter like a dickhead, but can someone tell me generally why it’s a serious issue if someone leaks your IP?
Since this sounds as if I’m trying to doxx someone: I’m posting after searching my own IP & I found that most websites pinpointed my address to a different country entirely?? (Still a country next to mines, but definitely more than far away enough for me to care if mines were leaked). Famous people who get doxxed online always move away for safety, so I’m really confused why that is when the website I used to check my own IP address on a bunch of places online at once usually all ended up being a whole country off.
Even though I shouldn’t need to state this outright; **don’t give a step-by-step guide on how to doxx people**. I don’t want to know that. I just want to know why IP grabbing is such a big deal and how doxxing is possible vaguely in a way that forces people to move cities.
In: Technology
It used to be that having your IP address leaked was not a big deal. On the internet, your IP address is not private. In fact, every website you connect to needs to inherently know your IP address for the internet to work at all. This was also the case for computers connecting directly to one another, which was super common about 20 years ago because big social media sites and centralized file sharing platforms didn’t really exist. For a long time, it wasn’t hugely impactful because there wasn’t really all that much you could *do* with an IP address other than communicate with someone, and it was even expected that other people had your IP address at all times.
The earliest attacks that you could perform against someone with their IP address are known as Denial of Service, or DoS, attacks. This is basically where you flood someone’s internet connection with so much traffic that they can’t do anything online. It’s like trying to water a garden with a fire hose. It was popular for a few years where people on massive university internet connections might flood a small home user’s computer with traffic over a disagreement on a forum or after losing in a game. This basically stopped being a problem once internet providers started implementing DoS prevention for almost all home internet connections.
Then there were attacks that targeted computers connected directly to the internet. These usually relied on someone finding a flaw or security bug in your computer’s code that let them remotely access your computer or install a virus. These stopped being an issue once people started putting their computers behind routers that had a built-in firewall, and once updates started to be pushed out to computers using the internet to specifically fix these security vulnerabilities.
After both of those two things were fixed, late 2000’s internet culture started to pop up where somehow the concept of having someone’s IP address equated to being able to “hack” someone… 5-10 years after it was actually an issue… It was a bunch of nonsense back then, and it’s a bit of nonsense now. Most people don’t understand the concept of what an IP address actually is, and culture has said that it’s a big deal if someone has your IP address and that it’s a thing connected to hackers so it must be a big deal!
In the middle of all of this, someone figured that it might be a good idea if we had a map of where every IP address was in the world, at least down to the city. This was possible because standards started to pop up where every individual IP address had to be registered with a specific company that owned it, that way nothing would overlap. Since your internet provider is usually a local company or a subsidiary of a bigger company that has a local office, this usually points to your general physical area. So, someone put together a database that tied these records together into one giant database that is easily searchable. You put in an IP address, and it comes back with the nearest city. This is mostly used by websites to provide localized results and not much more. If you went to say, weather.com, it would show you the forecast for your local area without you having to even input where you lived. If you went to the website for a travel agency, it might show you results for flights leaving from the closest airport. If you visited an international news website, it might change the language on the page to the one commonly spoken in your country. It’s a really useful tool!
But since the database is easily searchable by absolutely anyone, it ties into a different aspect of cybersecurity: Social Engineering. Social Engineering is the field of “hacking” people rather than computers. It’s the methods behind what gets things like scam calls or spam emails to work, and it’s a huge combination of psychology and computer security that often gets overlooked (I’m studying cybersecurity academically, and social engineering barely gets talked about academically and professionally). “Doxxing” is a form of social engineering where you find someone’s personal information through various means and then post it online in an attempt to harass or threaten someone. It’s not an easy task, but it’s usually a 3-4 step process that I will not go into extreme detail about.
The first hurdle to equating someone’s identity online to their real-life personal details is figuring out where they live. Getting someone’s IP address takes out a lot of the work of finding where someone is because that database that ties IP address to locations exists. From there, it’s fairly simple if you know what you’re doing and all of a sudden you have someone’s home address and a ton of other info that they probably don’t want you to know about them. Of course there’s a ton of intermediate steps, but it’s scary how efficiently someone with real experience can find all of someone’s personal information via just two pieces of info.
But there are a few things you can do to protect yourself from that. Number one is to be careful of the links you click on. There are services that can give someone your IP address just by clicking on a link. If you see a sketchy link from someone you don’t know, maybe don’t click on it. Second, be careful what you post on social media. Just a little bit of information is all someone might need to figure out all of your info. Keep things like your full name, the school you go to, the place you work, the places you travel, the car you drive, etc. all private. Don’t geo-tag your posts. Save your vacation photos until you get home and then post them. Never give out your full name on social media. It’s shockingly easy to find someone’s personal information just by the seemingly innocuous information they might share on social media!
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