One of the most common threats that a layman feels regarding data security is what exactly an IP address is and what it can reveal about the user? Here in this article, we will address these aspects regarding IP addresses.

What Is An IP Address?

First of all, billions of computer users worldwide don’t even know what an IP address is to put it in simple terms. An IP address is a network address for your computer so that the internet knows where to send you the mails, data, pictures, etc. Internet Protocol version 4 defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. 

These addresses are written in a human-readable format. A typical example of an IP address can be 2231.453.670.13. But don’t worry unless you are a techie, you don’t have to deal with this.

What Can Your Ip Address Reveal?

Now that you have a basic idea of what an IP address is, we shall now have a close look at what your IP address can reveal and bust the myths surrounding it. While every computer is given its IP address, the outside world rarely has access to this address.

A catch here is, when you send an email or visit a website, the IP address being shared is of your local router provided by your Internet Service Provider and not the individual address of your computer.

But for instance, if someone gets your computer’s IP address, then the most personal information shared is your geolocation. But, the silver lining is that it will not share your precise location; instead, it will just share the area, which will give only a rough idea of your location. Interestingly, there is more to it, and it is not as simple as it may seem.

A person having your IP address has a bit of access to who you are and what kinds of sites and contents are being surfed by you on your computer. Using these bits and pieces, a person can stitch together any information about the user through his IP address.

If someone has access to your geolocation, they can also restrict your access to some sites. It is similar to how Netflix or Hulu keeps people from accessing US content from India and vice versa.

An IP address can reveal many online activity details about you, which leads to an invasion of privacy. An example of privacy invasion is “personalized advertisements,” which deliver location-based advertisements in the native language.

Hackers can also hack your IP address and sell it to the dark web for profit. Ultimately, the dark web will use your database to impersonate you or find personal information or use it in scams.

How To Be Safe?

Since most of us love our privacy and dislike censorship, it becomes crucial for us to learn how to hide our IP addresses to make our data safe and secure.

The most common way to hide our IP address is by using a VPN (Virtual Private Network), a software service that encrypts all of the data sent to and from the internet and routes it through a VPN  server to another location. These VPN services are pocket friendly and cost you a mere amount of money to access hundreds and thousands of servers across the globe. 

A VPN will hide your real IP address and make you indistinguishable from all the other users, ensuring anonymity because your online activity cannot be traced back.

Another way of hiding and protecting the IP address is by connecting to a different network to change your IP address. If you feel that the IP address you are using is being compromised, blocked, or tracked by someone, you can change your network to get a new one.

For this, you can connect your device to a public or a private Wifi network or use your smartphone’s mobile data collection. But while using this method, one has to be careful as public Wifi and open networks are a hunting ground for the hackers who take undue advantage of the lack of encryption.

So this method is not so highly recommended, and one can go on with the sites like TOR or use a NAT firewall to hide the IP address as these sites are encrypted and have authentication. access to the admin username and password for your IP address, from here. There are numerous other ways to hide your IP address, and you can use them at your convenience. 

Conclusion

As we have discussed in detail in this article, what all your IP address can reveal about you, it entirely depends on your choice whether you want to hide your IP address or not. But, in today’s time, data security should be every user’s chief concern because at the end of the day, “prevention is better than cure,” isn’t it?

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Why Your Type of IP Address Matters?

The post What An Ip Address Can Reveal About You And How You Can Be Safe? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

It’s easier than you might think. You don’t need to do any behind-the-scenes programming or jailbreak your iPhone.

Instead, you just need to use one of the following options to change your iPhone IP Address:

1. Switch WiFi Networks or Use Mobile Data

If you’re not very particular about what IP address you’ll get, you can quickly change your current address by connecting to a different WiFi network.

Don’t forget – every single time you connect to a network, it automatically assigns your iPhone an IP address.

For example, let’s say you’re currently connected to WiFi Network 1 and have 192.168.100.10 as an IP address. When you connect to a WiFi Network 2, your IP address might change to 192.168.2.15.

If switching networks isn’t an option, use mobile data instead of WiFi. Your iPhone will connect to your mobile service provider’s network, meaning you’ll get a new, completely different IP address.

2. Use a VPN

VPNs are online services that encrypt your web traffic and hide your IP address. Of course, they don’t magically make your IP address go away. There’s a whole process behind how that works. Luckily, it’s not complicated at all. Here’s what happens:

1. You download and install a VPN app on your iPhone.
2. You use the app to connect to a VPN server.
3. After the connection is established, you start browsing the web and visiting websites.
4. When you go to a website, your connection requests will go through the VPN server. Because of that, the site will only see the server’s IP address, not your iPhone’s address.

Still, feeling a bit lost? No problem. Here’s a simple illustration that shows how a VPN connection works, and how it “hides” your IP address:

As you can see, the server acts as a middleman between your iPhone and the sites you visit.

If you need help finding a good iPhone VPN, here are some perfect apps. ProPrivacy’s guide has all the information you need to find the right service for you. And don’t worry, it’s all in an easy-to-scan format that’s very reader-friendly.

3. Try a Proxy Server

Proxies change your IP address just like VPNs – they intercept your connection requests and forward them to the websites you want to visit. So those sites only see the proxy server’s IP address.

The main difference between them and VPNs is the fact that proxies don’t offer strong encryption. Some of them don’t offer any encryption whatsoever. So while your IP address is hidden, your web traffic is still vulnerable to online surveillance.

Another thing that sets the two apart is the proxy’s local caching ability. It can save requested web pages on its local cache. When you request them, it doesn’t have to forward your requests to the web since it can just retrieve the content you want from its cache. 

That way, you might get slightly better load speeds. However, there’s also a pretty good chance the content you’ll get will be outdated.

4. Use Tor

Tor (The Onion Router) is a private network that routes your traffic through multiple servers. Any site you visit will only see the IP address of the exit node (the last server your traffic passes through).

To use the Tor network, you need to download and install the Onion Browser on your iPhone. When you’re done, just use it to browse the web, and your IP address will be hidden.

However, if you’re going to use Tor, you should mentally prepare yourself for slow speeds. At the moment, Tor’s servers (a little over 6,000) can’t always keep up with the total number of users (over two million).

5. Renew the DHCP Lease or Set Your IP to Static

We saved both methods for last because they’re a bit more of a hassle. We’re lumping them together because you can perform them both in the same section (WiFi settings).

Okay, so the first part – the DHCP lease. By renewing it, you’ll tell the network’s router to refresh your IP address (basically, give you a new one). Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi.
2. Tap the information icon (it’s a lowercase “i” in a circle) next to the network you’re connected to.
3. Tap Renew Lease.
4. When prompted, tap Renew Lease again.

Please keep in mind that renewing the DHCP lease won’t always change your IP address. It completely depends on the router and WiFi network’s settings.

Now, let’s move on to the second part – setting your IP to static. Doing that pretty much means you’ll manually change your IP address. Here’s how to do that:

1. Head to Settings > Wi-Fi
2. Tap the information icon next to the network you’re using.
3. Tap Configure IP, and then tap Manual.
4. Now, all that’s left is to manually enter a new IP address. Unfortunately, you’re limited to only changing the last digit or last two digits of your IP address. So if your IP address is 192.168.1.1, you can only change the “1.1” part.

So What’s the Best Way to Change Your IP Address on your iPhone?

That’s totally up to you. We just told you your options, but you have to decide which one works best for you.

If you’d like our opinion, we’d have to go with VPNs. They’re extremely user-friendly, and on top of hiding your IP address, they also secure your web traffic. So you get to enjoy complete online privacy.

Why Change Your IP Address on iPhone Anyway?

There are plenty of reasons to do that. Before we discuss them, you should know that you’ll only be able to enjoy these perks if you use a VPN, a proxy server, or Tor. Ideally, you should use a VPN.

So then, here are our top picks:

Get Around Any Firewall

Schools and workplaces often use firewalls to control what you can and can’t access on the web. For example, they might stop any outbound and inbound connections to and from YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.

They have good reasons to do that, of course – making sure that you’re productive, preventing people from accidentally accessing potentially malicious sites, or stopping everyone from using up too much bandwidth on non-work/non-school-related things.

Still, that doesn’t mean it’s fair for you. Maybe you just want to watch a quick video during your lunch break or send a quick message to your mom, dad, or significant other on Facebook.

But you can’t do stuff like that because the firewall gets in the way. 

How?

It’s simple – the network you’re on assigns your device its current IP address, and the network’s firewall regulates what inbound and outbound traffic is allowed to and from that IP address.

If you change your IP address, those traffic rules no longer apply to you. You get to browse the web freely.

Bypass Government Censorship

Governments often like to control what people can do on the Internet, with many oppressive regimes banning popular websites.

How do they do it?

By forcing national ISPs to block connections to and from them. They’re effectively using firewalls – as schools and workplaces do. 

So, all you need to do to defeat online censorship and unblock any sites you want is to change your IP address.

Unblock Geo-Restricted Content

Ever visited a site and got a message telling you something along the lines of “this content isn’t available in your country”?

That’s geo-blocking in action. It’s a form of content control technology that lets websites blacklist access to content based on users’ geo-locations. And any website you visit knows what your geo-location is because they can see your IP address. And it tells them what country and city you’re from.

If you were to hide it from them, you’d be able to bypass their geo-blocking methods. You just have to get an IP address from a region where the content is available.

For example, if you wanted to watch videos on BBC iPlayer, you’d have to get a British IP address because that content only works in the UK. 

Get Cool Discounts

You can sometimes see different prices based on what country you’re from. For instance, an online game on the PSN store might be cheaper in Malaysia than it is in the UK.

Since your IP address reveals your geo-location, it’s responsible for the changes in the price you experience. So hiding your IP address might help you get more favorable deals.

Protect Your Privacy

Websites and advertisers often track your IP address to associate it with your online preferences – like what kinds of videos or food you like, for instance.

Based on that data, they can then spam you with personalized ads (which are often borderline creepy). Changing your IP address will help you stay under the radar.

Know Other Ways to Change iPhone IP Addresses?

If you do, please let us know in the comments. Don’t forget to include step-by-step instructions if the process is lengthy. If you’d like to recommend a service, please remember to include a link too.

Suggested:

Why Does Your Type of IP Address Matter?

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We often hear the term “IP address”. But how many of us show our willingness to know what it is and how it helps one?.

IP stands for Internet Protocol and describes a set of standards and requirements for creating and transmitting data packets, or datagrams across networks.

In simple words, if I want to download a file from the Internet, then my computer should have an address so that the other networks on the Internet can find and locate my laptop to send the data to me. That address of my computer is known as an IP address.

Why Would Someone Want To Trace Your IP Address?

This question may have varied answers depending on your intention:

1. People or businesses with wrong intentions may use your IP address to commit some crime over the internet like cyberbullying. A hacker may use your IP address to hack into your system, track your location, etc.

2. People or businesses which are genuine will use your IP address to target you with better offers and ads. IP addresses can also be used to create a secure connection between two or more devices.

Though there are many ways to get someone’s IP address here, I would like to discuss the top 3 tricks to get someone’s IP address.

1. The IP Address from an email

Some email service providers or self-hosted mail servers may reveal the IP address. We can trace the sender’s IP address from the mail headers

In the settings of our email, we can find an option naming “headers,” by turning it on, it shows us the IP address of the sender along with other data. Here are the steps required for each of the email platforms:

GMAIL 

1. 1. Open the message
2. 2. Click on the 3 dots next to the Reply button
3. 3. Select Show Original and you will see the email header
4. 4. Find ” Received: from”, here you will find the IP address enclosed in the square brackets [].
5. In case it has more than one Received patterns, then you need to choose the last one as it will be the actual IP address of the sender.

HOTMAIL

1. Find the email you want to track then right-click on it and a drop-down menu will appear, click on the View message source option.
2. Now check:

a. If you find a header with X-Originating-IP followed by the IP address then that is the IP address of the sender.

b. If the previous method fails work then check for “Received: from” which is followed by the IP address of the sender.

c. In the case of multiple “Received: from” headers, you need to reject the ones having proxy.com

YAHOO! MAIL

1. Open the received mail then click on View Full Header option.
2. Find “Received: from” which is followed by the sender’s IP address enclosed in square brackets [].

In case there is more than one “Received: from” then select the one which is the last.

2. The online IP lookup tool

One of the easiest ways to get someone’s IP address is by using some websites like IPblogger.org, WhatIsMyIPAddress.com, etc.

There are many such websites that one can find on the Internet, like techieplus.net. These websites offer help in finding the IP address most easily.

3. Using command prompt

On Windows devices, we can find an IP address for a website with the command prompt. From the search box in the Start menu, we can see the command prompt. By opening the command prompt, we will notice the black DOS screen. On the command prompt screen, we type the words “ping host address,”. 

For example, “ping www.quora.com” now, the computer will try to find the server for that site and display the IP address. A ping attempt to establish a connection between our device and the victim’s device.

After knowing the tricks about finding someone’s IP address, you must be worried about how to conceal your IP address. So, here’s one reliable way to do so – by using a VPN service. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network.

When you connect to the VPN, you will be assigned a new IP address that hides your real one. This will prevent third parties from monitoring your online activities. Thus, VPN can encrypt your internet traffic and allow you to exchange data with other users safely.

3.Using Facebook

1.  Establish a connection with the user whose IP address you want to find out over Facebook chat.
2. Start a chat with the user and make sure that they remain online, then open the command prompt window and type the command “netstat -an” and press enter.
3. The user IP address will appear in a short period but remember to close all other windows before you execute the command else, it may return some other IP address.

Conclusion

Though these tricks of finding IP addresses are simple, one must not use these tricks to unnecessarily infringe the privacy of others.

Happy browsing!

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