Comment on What are the privacy risks of exposing IP adresses?
teslasaur@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Your ip is the identity of your router.
By using simple tools you can find the manufacturer of your router and potentially use a known security to gain access to your network.
You expose yourself to being targeted by focused network attacks, since they know the address belongs to you.
In ye olden days, it would have been possible to track your ip and what it was accessing online. Its harder to do today due to cryptography and vpn’s, but still a risk.
Are you maybe thinking of MAC addresses? That would be closer being the “identity” of a device and you can typically identify the manufacturer from it. You can’t see the MAC address of a remote router via the internet though unless you are on its local network.
An IP address is usually a temporary lease provided by your ISP, and residential connections usually get a new one every once in a while (like every 24 hours).
My Starlink provider changed every few days but my new fiber connection has been unchanged for 6 months since I got it. I have taken advantage of that and have hosted some stuff on a domain that’s pointing back to that address and port forwarded.
shalafi@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What?! You need the MAC to identify a router and MACs don’t go over the internet.
I’ll let you go ahead and explain that one.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 3 days ago
No, of course not the MAC. Just as an example nmap can guess the OS based on fingerprinted behaviours. There are pentesttools that can guess the OS.
Like i said. Old days. You could get access to a distribution switch where the physical security was all that mattered. The town where i grew up had some early variation of cg-nat that meant all devices where in a way on the same network. It created plenty of issues when trying to play online with friends during Quake/WC3 etc.
credo@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Maybe if you open a browser to it and external management is allowed, it might say linksys?
lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 4 days ago
Also nmap uses fingerprinting on port scans to identify devices. Or attempt to, a lot of the time it doesn’t know, or says “Linux”