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
There are a few types of doxxing. I don’t know the proper names so I’m using ones that make sense to me.
The first is a flood attack. Basically an IP address is a computer’s phone number. It uses it to make calls to other computers for websites and games and so on. Just like if someone knows your phone number they can call you over and over to the point you never have time to make calls out for stuff you want to do. At that point you effectively have 0 internet because you can’t use it for anything.
The second is to use the IP address as a way to track you down. As you said, the IP address itself isn’t very accurate and can show as another country. But ISPs like to have people use the same IP addresses if they can. It’s for a good reason, banks and other secure services are much happier if someone doesn’t use 20 different addresses to access the same account each day. But this means if a person tracks what sites the IP address accesses over time they can find out a lot of info about you.
If the address connects to a bank website, you probably live in a city with a bank branch.
If you access a restaurant website you are probably close to that place and might visit in the next day or two.
If you access a school website you or a family member probably goes to that school.
If you post on reddit or another site that post typically logs the ip used so they now know your username and you probably use the same name everywhere so that instantly gives another method to find info about you.
Maybe using that username they find an old website you used to post on 10 years ago and you posted a pic of you standing in front of your new house.
That pic has geo data in the metadata so they now know within ~100 meters where your house is.
Hop on google street view and within a few minutes they match that picture to an exact street address and can do whatever they want with it.
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