this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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It's like putting your phone number on the wall of a bathroom stall. Maybe you won't get a lot of prank calls, maybe you will. It's a crapshoot.
The thing is, posting your public IP is like asking for a number of hackers to start probing your network for lapses in security. Not because you're a juicy target, but simply because you put the information out there. That's been bog standard for the internet for 20 years now.
Sure, IP addresses can be found through various ways, but having them out for everybody to see is just asking for more trouble than it is worth. You're making yourself a target and creating more work for yourself if you're constantly getting hacked because of it.
Like I don't even want to do anything malicious and I immediately started up a traceroute.
A trip to shodan should be enough to convince you that ipv4 space is small enough that it really doesn't buy you much to hide anything. Maybe a tiny bit of extra privacy by not associating an identity to an IP, but even that is pretty quickly blown away if you host anything identifiable. Which is the small web we'd benefit from restoring anyway.
The difference is a random IP is a random IP. You don't know who it's connected to. Once someone says "This is my IP" you now have it connected to a specific person, and other specific people may want to fuck with the original person.
Bots already scan all open IP addresses for vulnerabilities, but hackers live for people who give up information for free because fucking with someone who thinks they're safe from it all is fun to them apparently.
Right, that's the privacy aspect I mentioned. PII tied to your IP is now available, even if it's just a pseudoidentity. But hosting anything also likely throws that out the window in the same way. Unless you have more users on your hosted service, but even then it narrows things down.