| IP Address Misconceptions | |
If you spend a lot of time online, playing games or browsing social media, you've probably had someone threaten to hack your computer in a petty argument. Oftentimes they will claim to have your IP address and that they can do all kinds of malicious things to your computer with it. I've encountered this many times and the bottom line is that is not true. However, I have listened to many people tell me how worried they were after hearing that. I decided to write a blog to try and clarify some of the misconceptions about your IP address and about "hacking" in general.
I would like to begin with a description of what your IP address is. The best way for me to do that is with an analogy. Picture the internet as a giant city. Every building in the city has to be able to communicate with the other buildings, but in order to do that they need an address. Picture your IP address as your home address. It identifies your location on the internet so that other computers can talk to yours. Everytime you do anything on the internet your computer is sending its IP address to other computers all over the world so that they can send back the stuff you are asking for. When you are visiting a website online, your computer will contact that website and give it your IP address. The website will then use your address to send you back the web page you are trying to view. In real life someone with your address could come to your house and do all sorts of things, but on the internet simply having your IP address means nothing.
Your house probably has 1-3 doors. Houses on the big city block of the internet have many doors and most of them are closed. A few of those doors have specific people (programs) behind them waiting for someone else to knock. So your web browser is one of those people. It is waiting behind a port (a door), port 80 to be exact, for another computer to come knocking. So when the website you are viewing sends back the web page, it knocks on port 80's door, your browser answers the door and accepts the information. Most doors on your computer are closed with nobody waiting to answer. The only way someone could obtain access to your computer is if they manage to sneak a person into your virtual house and position him to unlock one of its doors and then wait for some shady character to come knocking.
Now lets say that I want to obtain access to your computer without your knowledge. The first step is sneaking in a program (virus) that can open one of those doors and wait for me to contact it. This is where you come in. The only way I could sneak a program onto your computer is if I can get you to download and install it. I could bundle it with some software that I knew you were already going to download and install. I could send it to you in an email and try to disguise it as a program that does something you want, instead of the virus it actually is. Basically, you have to be the one to install it. The problem is that there are many things on the internet that you could download and install and bring a virus with it that you might never know about. There are all kinds of ways to trick people into downloading something they shouldn't. You just have to educate yourself and only download things from sites you know you can trust. Usually sites for big companies providing products are virus free. Viruses mostly come from backwater websites with no real reputation.
Once I have this guy in your virtual house ready to answer the door, I could tell him to do almost anything. He could run around your house while you're asleep and steal things, spy on your activities, etc. But in the end you had to let the guy in. He may have been disguised as your best friend wanting to tell you about a cool online game, but you let him in. So the next time someone threatens to "hack" your computer, feel free to laugh...............unless of course he sent you an email with something awesome you installed recently.
That's the skinny on your IP address and its susceptibility to attack.
- Alex
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