A developer behind the game "Crab Game" warned streamers to stay out of public lobbies in November 2021 after finding that the title could reveal players' IP addresses to distributed denial-of-service attacks. The warning followed streamer xQc losing his internet connection soon after playing the game, though he could not confirm an attack caused that outage. The developer later moved to newer Steam networking to conceal IP addresses. The episode illustrates what an IP address can and cannot do in the hands of an attacker.
An IP address does not expose passwords or personal data, but it gives an attacker a target. Most home routers now let multiple devices share a single public IPv4 address, while IPv6 can assign each device its own public-facing address. A simple lookup can reveal a user's internet service provider and an approximate city or region. In 2016, a Kansas family sued MaxMind after its database tied roughly 650 million unrelated IP addresses to their farm, bringing repeated law enforcement visits over incidents that involved people elsewhere.
A typical DDoS attack floods a target with traffic from many sources, the same kind of attack Bluesky blamed for its server outages. On a smaller scale it can disrupt gaming sessions, video calls, or an entire household's internet connection, and a firewall may offer little help once the connection is saturated. Reaching a device requires a way in, such as an exposed security camera, remote-access software with a security flaw, or a home server protected by a weak password. IPv4 port forwarding or permissive IPv6 firewall settings can leave those services exposed.
Some IPv6 addresses are used only inside local or private networks, and temporary IPv6 addresses change over time, making individual devices harder to track, though devices on one home network may still share a recognizable address prefix. A properly configured router firewall can block unsolicited connections while allowing responses to traffic initiated from inside the network. One OpenWrt user on Reddit enabled IPv6, tested a home server remotely, and found remote-access and file-sharing ports reachable from outside; the firewall had been set to allow forwarding, and switching it to reject closed the opening.
In October 2026, Microsoft disclosed CVE-2026-105016, a critical vulnerability in its QUIC implementation that could let specially crafted IPv6 traffic execute code in affected .NET applications on Windows. Microsoft's advisory did not say whether attackers had exploited the flaw. Rather than disabling IPv6 entirely, the guidance is to review router firewall settings for both protocols, remove unnecessary remote-access rules, and install security updates. Microsoft notes that turning off IPv6 could cause problems with some Windows components.
A VPN can hide a user's usual public IP address from websites if it handles both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic correctly, but it will not patch vulnerable software, and it is worth confirming the VPN is working before relying on it.
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