If a cybercriminal knows your IP address, the consequences can be devastating: While your IP address won’t give away sensitive information like your phone number or approximate location, hackers can still use your IP against you. While using social media is fun, these platforms collect a lot of sensitive information about your life, friends, habits, interests, and your IP.Ĭheck out our brief video on this topic below. Hackers can set a fake hotspot and view your IP address and personal information or even infect your device with malware. If you like to participate in various discussions when you’re connected to the internet at home, forum admins can view your public IP address and sniff out your location. Some online ads can be created by malicious actors and put your security at risk. When you click on an ad, you’re giving your IP to the service provider. Anyone who owns that server can go and look up your IP. Every time you visit a website, your IP address is collected and stored on a server. If somebody has found out your router’s password and logged in, they can easily view your IP address. Whoever owns that server will see your IP address. Any link you click on will need to provide your IP address for the server at the other end to deliver the content provided by the link. Yahoo! and Microsoft Outlook are known to include IP addresses in the email header.

If you send an email to someone, they can check the header of the message, which could contain your IP address. If somebody borrows or uses your computer, they can find out what your IP address is in seconds because countless free websites help you do that. People can get hold of your IP address in plenty of ways. Since your IP address holds certain information about you, someone could use it for malicious purposes.

This can be useful when port-forwarding – if you want certain data to be sent directly from your router to your computer IP address. For example, if you want your computer IP address to always stay the same, you’ll be able to specify that through the device’s settings. Most ISPs use dynamic IP addresses, which aren’t fixed to your device, but you can have a static IP if you wish to (you can learn more about different types of IP addresses here). If you connect to a different Wi-Fi or move house, your IP address will change along with your location. Your IP address is a unique string of numbers assigned to you by your ISP – like a delivery address for online traffic.

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