For one big world of only ones and zeros, the Internet can sometimes be a scary place. If you have been using the Internet for many years, it is most likely that your information has been leaked or your password has been stolen. Consider this an arrival from the territory.
Even with the strictest security standards, there is nothing you can do if there is a data breach on a website that is trusted with your information.
In such cases, as elsewhere on the Internet, we attach ourselves to an identifier called an IP address. While your IP address is not as sacred as your fingerprint, it is still a part of your digital information that should be protected and understood.
So what happens if someone gets your IP address? Can bad things happen? In this article, we’ll cover a few topics: what is an IP address and what will be at stake if your address leaks.
What is an IP address?
While there are many sites where IP addresses can be broken for technical reasons, most Internet users are inexperienced and require explanation from a non-professional.
Simply put, an IP address is a string of four-octet dot-separated numbers that are assigned to you every time you connect to the Internet. IP addresses are allocated in several ways, but the most notable is that this will be directly related to your physical location and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). An ISP is a company that provides you with Internet access, such as Comcast or AT&T.
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Example IP address: 69.89.31.226. This address was assigned to the device the moment it established an Internet connection, and although not permanent, it will remain assigned to the device based on certain conditions that are often specific to each individual ISP.
For most ISPs, simply unplugging your router and reconnecting after a few minutes will update your IP address. Others may ask you to call to release and renew the IP. There are billions of IP addresses floating around in the IPv4 space, which is the four-octet format described earlier – in fact, there are so many that we will soon have to convert to IPv6 before all possible IPv4 addresses are allocated.
How do I find my IP address?
On the Online Tech Tips site, we recently published a long article that explains the different ways to find your public IP address
However, the easiest and easiest way to do this is to enter a phrase such as “my IP address” into a Google search. Google will immediately show your current IP address above the search results.
What does my IP address reveal?
At first glance, an IP address appears to be no more identifying than just a phone number. However, just as the Internet allows us to track a phone number and receive much more personally identifiable information, your IP address does say a lot about you, including your location.
But don’t be alarmed! Geolocating an IP address and a device’s GPS location are two different things. For mobile devices, determining the exact physical location is quite possible. If you only have an IP address, this is not the case.
The best way to find out exactly what your IP address says about you is to just see it with your own eyes. We recommend using an IP address data provider such as IPinfo IPinfo has a page that you can go to and instantly see all of the freely available information about your IP address
On this page, you will see the city, postal code, coordinates, time zone, local time, and even a map associated with your IP address. However, you will notice that none of this information is accurate. This information may indicate a nearby area, but is nowhere near as accurate as GPS location data. This is by design.
This geolocation information actually refers to your ISP, the information about which you will see on the same page: hostname, ASN, organization (usually the ISP name), connection speed, etc. The exact location you see on map must match the servers of your internet provider nearest to you.
How can I protect my IP address?
Your IP address is far from private, and almost every website or service you interact with on the Internet will use it in one way or another. While your IP address by itself doesn’t mean everything someone needs to show up at your doorstep, it is still a valuable piece of your privacy that you might want to protect.
If someone wants to find you, the IP address can help confirm suspicions and find more accurate information. The IP address also puts you at risk for denial of service attacks, which can congestion or shut down your internet connection for hours at a time.
The easiest way to protect your IP address is to stay connected to the VPN. A VPN, or virtual private network, tunnels your internet connection through a proxy server so that your real IP address is only visible to the VPN provider. The IP address assigned by the VPN is what websites and potentially attackers will see from your device.
While most VPNs are not free, you can check out Online Tech Tips’ Top Five VPN Apps for more information on how to use them to protect your IP address.
Fear not – without additional context, there will be no pin on the map to fall on your home when someone searches for your IP address. However, your IP address can provide important clues related to your general location, and if the wrong person gets it, potentially a DDoS attack could follow.
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