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
Anyone who isn’t trying to track you, specifically, won’t learn anything useful, and anyone who is trying to track you, specifically, probably doesn’t need your IP. At worst, you saved them a bit of time.
An IP address just gives an extremely approximate location. It’s extremely rare for a hacker to be able to get a single street address from an IP. There’s a few reasons for this, but the biggest reason is that ISP’s reassign IP addresses often enough that an IP that corresponds to my place one day, might correspond to my neighbor down the street the next, and might not exist the day after that. So, when they see your connection having some IP, all they know is that you’re in a range of houses capable of having that IP assigned. And this by itself, isn’t enough information to do much to you.
To actually track you down, they need to connect that IP with more specific details, and most of the ways to do that, work whether they have your IP or not. If you show pictures of your house, for instance, they could read the house number and get it that way, but then they can just look up your house from the picture, no IP necessary. Similarly, if you accidentally leak your address, or someone phishes you into telling them your address, or hacks a computer holding your address, they have your address – again, no IP necessary. And if someone hacks your phone, they can see its GPS reading, and they have your address, no IP necessary.
If you know what you’re doing, and have the time and resources necessary, it’s relatively straightforward (albeit slow) to hack someone. But the people who know what they’re doing, generally focus on targets of actual value. Political enemies, people rich enough to extort, people against whom they hold serious grudges, that kinda thing. Hackers who will pick on a single random individual just for the lolz, are incredibly rare. And if you are sufficiently important to get that kind of attention, you’re probably worth putting in enough effort that “wait for your IP to leak” isn’t an essential part of their plan.
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