Whats the Deal?

Why are people soooo, interested in getting people's IP.
Alot of people on this forum think that with an IP you can Hax there world upside down.
IF IF IF you have a bot-net of about *00+ computers and you know what the hell your doing, you can DDOS and thats about it.
Other than that, you cant really death ping anymore without the other person in a chat room and from my understanding you still have to have a bot net.

Is there anything im missing?!?!

If there is please kindly post what you can do,
because im clueless as to why people want IP's so bad.

That's the exact reason people want IPs, they think you can "Unleash UBAR h4x" with it. I try to teach people that IPs aren't useful if you want a way to do a quick hack.

What do they think they can do?

They that going into Command Prompt, typing a DOS command such as ping, tracert, or nslookup, followed by the IP address, will magically lead to getting access to the person's computer.

Some use WHOIS on the IP and think they can get all of the person's personal information.

rofl.
too new.

You certainly can't trust the web domain registry info as accurate. That data can be *00&#*7; bogus. And even if it is accurate, it isn't the type of personal info usually of much use for identity theft. Here's mine.
[url]http://www.whois.org/whois_new.cgi?d=neoprogrammics.com[/url]

Can someone use it to steal my identity?
LOL

I don't understand what is meant by 'IP stealing', unless 'stealing' is being used as a figure of speech. Every time someone visits my site, they automatically leave their IP in the logs. It's not confidential or dangerous information and recording it is not stealing or doing anything whatsoever illegal.

You can indeed use an IP to get into someone's computer, but only IF there is no security in place. One can scan a range of IPs and upon finding an active one, scan for open ports.

In rare cases, some open un******* ports can be used to gain access without the owner's knowledge or permission. But this is far more the exception than the rule. But it starts with knowing the IP number.

I speak from experience because it happened to me once when someone left a text file on my web server telling me it was insecure. Nobody should have been able to put files there. All because ONE single port was open by default. He could have done some serious harm if he had wanted to. This problem has since been fixed.

Apparently, most noobs totally overrate the importance of the IP. It really doesn't automatically give the whole world a secret tunnel into anyone's system unless they have no form of security at all. And even then, you need to understand exactly what you are doing to accomplish it. Most computers that are completely insecure most likely have no content of much interest to the serious hacker, as might be the content of an insecure corporate or government server.

Serious hackers are not the ones who simply vandalise individual PCs, like punk kids smashing windows. Those are script kiddies going through a phase. Serious crackers (I prefer 'crackers' to differentiate between good and evil programmers) are the ones who do serious harm and cause massive DoS attacks or pilfer sensitive documents that were not intended for public access, such as ****** card information, etc.

If those so-called hackers are so smart, why can't they use their expertise for something constructive and useful, for which they can receive positive recognition, rather than devious schemes like stealing passwords or account data or phishing, etc., in which case they have to remain hidden for obvious reasons.

Anyone can destroy something of quality in an instant, but not just anyone can create it. Same with computers.

The only time an IP is likely to be dangerous knowledge is when you do something illegal, like post kiddie porn to a web site or try to break into a secure system and leave a record of your IP in the logs of the site where the illegal activity took place. The legal people can then use it to help ***** you down in a manner similar to tracing caller-ID.

Aside from some egregious violation of the law, few would pay any attention to your IP or have any valid reason to.

Like I said, it is possible to use an IP to get into a computer, aka DDOS.
But that is practically impossible.
It takes a bot net of about *00+ un******* computers with the bot trojan on them.

So other than that, what else is there to do?
Its practiacally impossible to death ping anymore.

And they way people get ****** card info and personal info is not with an IP.
Its called scamming.
For instance,
If you get an email regarding your paypal acc.,
with some simple coding,
when whomever opens the email, it looks like an actuall login page or something along the lines of "We need to verify your ****** card information."
After they fill all the information out,
Depending on how youve codded this fake page.
The information can be sent via email.
But I woulnt recoment that because that can be traced.
So use something like an AIM chatroom or something.
So when the submit the information, its puts them in a hidden chatroom,
and then posts the information directly there.
EZ stuff if you know what your doing.

But to get back to topic, there isnt anything like that (to my knowledge) using an IP.

And btw port 80 is always open.

DDOS won't help you get into a computer, it'll just take it offline.

I haven't used a computer with a direct connection to the internet for months. I'd say the days of DDoS attacks are over, at least for home machines.

[QUOTE]You certainly can't trust the web domain registry info as accurate. That data can be *00% bogus. And even if it is accurate, it isn't the type of personal info usually of much use for identity theft. Here's mine.[/QUOTE]

It's not illegal to do that, but most large companies would want to fill in details like that properly so people take them seriously.