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
The IP in itself, can be used to DDoS someone, which is the process of flooding someone with requests to overwhelm it. This isn’t that bad, and since most domestic IPs are dynamic, your router will crash, reset, and your IP will likely reset. It could also be used to sniff out vulnerabilities in your network, that without the IP they couldn’t have done in the first place.
But used in conjunction with other information about you, it can be used to narrow down your location. If you have a consistent background in your selfies, that can narrow down your location, but without knowing the general area that’s going to be a monolithic task, having an active IP you can ping, you can get a hop 1-100 miles away from you (hot singles in #TOWN NAME# area), which may be enough to track down your street address.
From there you can then use basic details to continue narrowing it down, till you get an exact address (car type/color, domicile type, windows/floor).
Every drip of information, when used in combination, exponentially increases the value of all the other parts, if someone really wants to doxx you. When given to the general public, they’re not of any real interest, specially when in different locations, or for a normal user who doesn’t have that many people interested in them. But when you have 1,000s or 1,000,000s of people interested in you, the chance that just 1 of them is malicious enough to socially hack you, becomes higher to the point of almost a given.
From there, either they can be the stalker type, where they just obtain this information and try to gain access to you. Scary, but for the most part an annoyance. Or they can use this information to maliciously hack/ransom you. Think of all the things that are locked behind questions like address, favorite X, phone number, many different types of information that can be obtained from these social hacking techniques. Before even contacting you, or getting anything directly from you that isn’t just publicly available as an influencer for instance.
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