What Can Someone Do With Your IP Address?

Several people have many answers to what somebody can do with your IP address. Some say they could sneak into your network and do malicious acts, such as installing malware and DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

According to others, they find your geographical location through your ISP(Internet Service Provider), which may or may not lead to harmful acts such as hacking your Facebook accounts. While according to another, they can’t do anything unless your IP address is in the hands of a genius hacker.

Which of the above scenarios is possible?

Well, in reality, all the above scenarios are possible. This article aims for you to be aware of what someone can do with your IP if it falls into the wrong hands, such as a hacker with wealth of experience. After all, there are various ways in which hackers can steal your IP. However, we’ll leave that topic for another article.

In this article, you’ll find out how hackers can exploit your system so that you know of the risks involved and safeguard your IP address. First and foremost, let’s discover potential phases hackers could undertake, given that they found your IP address.

What Does a Hacker Do in Pre-attack Phase?

This is where the hacker acquires all the necessary information about your device to launch a cyberattack on it or your network. It involves the following tasks:

• Ping your IP: A hacker would ping your IP address using ICMP packets to test if your device is up and running.
• Scan for open ports: If your device is up and running, then a hacker scans for open ports using tools such as Nmap. This tool can also expose your OS (Operating System) version and its services, including web servers, DNS servers, and applications. Shoudan.io is another program that hackers utilize to scan for ports.
• Vulnerability Scanning: Hackers can determine which ports are not protected after scanning your ports. Then they perform vulnerability scanning to determine if there are loopholes in your network configurations. If so, they launch the attacks that your network is vulnerable to, such as DDoS attacks.

What is the Attacking Phase?

In the attacking phase, a hacker employs various methods, such as Social Engineering Attacks, spam emails with trojans or malware, DDOS, or DoS attacks. Hackers may also utilize tools such as Metasploit to launch massive-scale cyberattacks.

Some other ways a hacker gets into your network are by using password crackers, which break authentication mechanisms in FTP, telnet protocol, or SSH.

If the vulnerable target device is your PC, the hacker may cause any malicious act or impersonate you for malicious activities. However, hackers can do the following in the next section if the target machine is a web server.

How can a Hacker Compromise the Web Server?

• SQL injection:When hackers discover vulnerabilities in your web application, they type SQL queries in login forms, search, or sign-up forms. By doing so, they most likely gain access to sensitive information such as passwords.
• Cross-site scripting:Hackers can send a malicious client-side script in JavaScript, HTML, Flash, or any other client-side script to a web application through a browser. Since the browser cannot identify that the script originated from an untrusted source, this malicious script can access cookies, session tokens, and other confidential information.
• Cross-site forging: In cross-site-forging attack the attacker forces a genuine authenticated user to initiate a request they didn’t intend to do. Such requests include, changing an email address, deleting a vital record in a database, making a payment to a hacker’s account, changing a password, or any other activity that a regular web application user did not intend to perform.
• Shell injection: In certain circumstances, a web developer may design a web application to capture input from a user, and the server executes them and display the output on the screen. In such a situation, a hacker may take advantage of it by running commands as input for a malicious purpose, such as getting all the files on the server.

After acquiring confidential data by any of the above means, a hacker may launch a cyberattack by taking control of the web server, depending on the hacker’s intention. Next comes the post-exploitation phase, where the hacker makes it challenging to trace the malicious activities they have committed.

What is the Post-exploitation Phase?

In the post-exploitation phase, one of the primary activities includes clearing all the log files and brushing out so that the users of the target machine find it highly challenging to trace the hacker. From the hacker’s point of view, clearing all the log files is vital as the hacker might target the same device again if they cannot accomplish all the goals in the first attack.

How to Protect Your IP Address?

As you discovered in this article, a well-educated hacker can carry out devastating attacks that cost you and expose your privacy. So it’s beneficial to protect your IP address from malicious attacks and let’s look at how to protect your IP.

1. Hide your IP address: There are numerous ways to hide your IP address. I have covered a separate article on 6 Methods to hide your IP address. Read on to find more.
2. Use strong passwords for your device instead of using the default password.
3. Educate yourself on how to recognize phishing and malicious emails.
4. Use the latest anti-malware or anti-virus software version when using PCs or mobile devices.
5. Test your web application thoroughly using any of the web application testing methods discussed.

So keep your IP address secure; if it gets into the wrong hands, the damage could be devastating.