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my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2020 6:23 am
by qasad
my friend told me that when i download i can see all other peers IP and also they can see mine, he told me that this is dangerous for your pc as he can access it. is this true i am a noob in this matter

Re: my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2020 12:06 pm
by Zoloft
Yes. BitTorrent works (all clients) by creating a direct connection between your IP address to someone else's IP address. Is this bad? Well, that's up to you. If it's a concern, use a seedbox.

Re: my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2020 5:38 pm
by Clothes
Sure, it can be bad. Your friend is right, depending on how secure your computer is, people may hack into it. Also, read at torrentfreak how YTS is providing user torrent IPs to MAFIIA lawyers so the studios can sue those users for maybe million$. It's a dirty world and at the very least you should have a decent VPN service.

Re: my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2020 3:18 pm
by FranciscoPombal
The two posts above me are misleading and borderline FUD. Nobody can "access" your PC unless you explicitly give them permission to do so with some kind of remote login application, or if they exploit some serious bug lurking in a network facing application (any application, not just a BitTorrent client) in your PC or your PC's network stack. Plus, unless you're doing something you really shouldn't, BitTorrent clients don't run with administrative privileges, which means they are not very suitable for the kind of remote exploitation that would enable a "hacker" to "access" your PC.

Plus, modern systems are pretty secure in general. 99.9% you hear about people (sometimes hundreds or thousands) getting "hacked" in the fake news media, it's just an instance of the following:

- Joe uses the same simple password for 50 websites, including Google and Facebook, but also dating sites and shitty browser games.
- One of the sites has an incompetent sysadmin that leaves the user database unencrypted and available publicly by accident.
- "Hackers" obtain the database by simply downloading it once they find the link (you can imagine they stumbled upon the link by luck even).
- The "hackers" know that there are many people like Joe, who use the same password for different websites, so they proceed to try the same user/email+password combinations they found on other websites.
- With this method, the hackers obtain access to Joe's Facebook, Google, and Disney+ account
- Joe is upset :(
- The fake news media reports that Google, Facebook and Disney+ were "hacked", when in fact it was simply a case of accounts getting compromised due to poor user security practices.

A BitTorrent client simply requests pieces of files from others and enables other clients to request pieces of a specific file(s) from you. Your client only reads from files that belong to the torrent (you can think of the .torrent file as a "manifest"). Others can't randomly access other files in your system.

Assuming you practice good password hygiene and don't run random "hot_girl.exe" files you find online with administrative privileges, hacking you in the Hollywood sense (e.g. bad people completely taking over and thrashing your PC remotely) nowadays is only a realistic possibility for nation state-level attackers specifically targeting you. And there are much better ways to obtain information on you or "attack" you in some way that take way less effort and cost way less money, thus being available to lower-level attackers; some of those methods don't involve computers at alĺ!

The only thing you have to worry about when torrenting is if you live in a country where your ISP or government considers participation in a torrent swarm of certain content to be "copyright infringement". If that is the case, if they see your IP in said swarm, they might send you a letter or something like that. If you want/need to avoid that, just use a VPN when torrenting.

EDIT:

Also, a point about "IP being revealed to others" - your IP address is just that - an address. The other side of the communication channel has to know where to send data back to. Every time you access a website in your browser, you are also "revealing" your IP address to that website (and the website is revealing theirs to you). If you want to avoid this, you must use some kind of method to mask the origin of your request, for example:
- VPN
- Proxy
- Having a friend visit the site on their machine on your behalf and tell you the results
...

Re: my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2020 1:26 am
by Clothes
by FranciscoPombal » Sun Oct 04, 2020 11:18 am -
The two posts above me are misleading and borderline FUD.
REALLY?!??! Please go into great detail explaining how my post is either misleading or fud.

Re: my ip and others are revealed? is it bad?

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2020 12:38 pm
by FranciscoPombal
Clothes wrote: Mon Oct 05, 2020 1:26 am REALLY?!??! Please go into great detail explaining how my post is either misleading or fud.
Don't take it personally.
You made essentially 2 points. The first one:
Sure, it can be bad. Your friend is right, depending on how secure your computer is, people may hack into it.
in the context of this thread makes it seem like this is "easy" and/or "frequent", when running a BitTorrent client. The reality is that people don't just "hack into computers", like Hollywood/the fake news media would have you believe. It's much less glamorous/amazing/hacker man 9000 than that in reality. I addressed this at length in my post above.

The second one, which I didn't address before, but I can do so now:
Also, read at torrentfreak how YTS is providing user torrent IPs to MAFIIA lawyers so the studios can sue those users for maybe million$. It's a dirty world and at the very least you should have a decent VPN service.
implies that people get sued all the time for copyright infringement by media giants (leaving readers to guess that they lose the lawsuit, because who can win against such powerful corps?), based on IPs in a swarm. If you read torrentfreak for any length of time, you know that this is not the case. IPs in a swarm alone is not evidence that holds up in court to implicate someone in a copyright infringement crime, due to multiple reasons, which I'm not going to bother explaining here, go read about it if you care.

At worst, people can receive letters from their ISP telling them to "please stop", or from so-called "copyright trolls", who attempt to extort people by resorting to BS lawsuit threats - torrentfreak also does extensive coverage of this phenomenon. They are nothing to worry about. Sometimes, in some countries such as the US, ISPs may actually threaten to cut off your service (and actually follow through with it), because they'd rather throw you under the bus than deal a subhuman copyright troll. That's just how it is.

Legally, unless you are at the top of the food chain, you have nothing to worry about. No one cares about you if you are the average Joe downloading and seeding. People care about the top dogs, such as the big scene groups like SPARKS (their operation was recently dismantled, it was big news).