Should the IP address be hidden ?

[Grayson]

I belong to a commercial field. I have a desktop system which I bought last 1 year ago. I mostly work on Tally which is an accounting tool and apart from that I play a few games which were already available when I purchased the system. I have been promoted in my designation and my work load is increased too , in order to carry out my work at my home as well I recently took a internet connection at my place. I have taken an unlimited plan as suggested by my ISP service provider. I am not that techie kind of guy, but I know that it is very important to keep our system safe from the spammers, viruses and unauthorized access , so I need to know a few basic things about networking, when talking about IP addresses of a system, what type of address does it means to. Is the IP address should be concealed from others ? If yes , is there any software or a tool available which can help me in hiding the IP address? Please guide me on this topic and give your comments as much as possible.

[Amie]

Yes you should definitely take some advanced measures to prevent your system from lots of threats such as malwares,spyware,spammers, hackers and wll those who try to infiltrate in your network area and do all the unintentainal activities which violates the IT laws. It is the foremost advice that do not use your internet connection unless you have an updated anti-virus software, I would suggest you Kaspersky. As far as the IP address is concerned, I do not have much idea about it but I know that it is a unique address that identifies any router or networking device. I think you can ban the IP address of some user instead of hiding it from others but not sure.

[Carley]

An IP address is a the protocol address of any networking device. It is a numerical label that is allocated to any device that indulges in accessing the computer network and uses Internet protocol as a media to communicate between the participating devices. The IP address is generally allocated and has two primary functions that includes identifying the interface of the host computer or network with which it is connected and assign the address to it. Once the interface is identified and the address of the location is assigned , it is routed by the router i.e the correct and probably the shortest path is derived by the router.

[Grayson]

That was really a very helpful piece of information . I have learned something about the IP address and I have installed an updated Anti-virus as well. But I am still hungry to know about the IP address. Is IP address same as the protocol hardware address ? A technician of my service provider came to my house and showed me how to check the IP address from the status bar, he also guided me to check the default gateway and the subnet mask. But still I do not get all the things about the IP address. My one question still remains unanswered, so please tell me can I hide the IP address ?

[Lemog]

I can tell you something about hiding the IP adress. If you talk in technical terms , hiding an IP address is not possible each and every time and specially the address of a network that is being used in public in a home network. You already know that you will not be able to communicate or establish connection between a host and a network unless you have an IP address , so if try to hide or conceal an IP address of any network completely then the service which the networking devices is rendering to it's client or host computers will be obstructed or stopped, or in simpler terms the clients will be deprived of their services. But there is one way to do it as far as I know. You can conceal or hide an IP address using a proxy server which is not known so it is also called as anonymous proxy server.

[addie]

Ip address is totally different from the hardware address. Yes you can call an IP address as a protocol address or a logical address because it uses the IP protocol. But IP address is not an hardware address, an hardware address is the physical address of any networking device , sometime also called as MAC address or Machine, while IP address states the logical addressing od the devices in form of octets. There are two versions of IP address one is version 4 and the other one is version 6 , also called as IPv4 and IPv6 respectively . There are two methods of assigning an IP address one is Static and other is dynamic IP address. Accessing a public IP address means you can access it on the global internet while a network with private Ip address is not accessible to everyone on the global network .

[Sabastiaan]

Yes you can definitely hide the IP address of your home network with an anonymous proxy server, it generally acts a bridge between that and the outside world network. So when any of the internal host want to interact or communicate with the outside network , it cannot to do it directly but with the help of a proxy server. The host gives it's request to the proxy server and gives it all necessary information including it's own IP address, after authentication, the proxy server forwards the request on the behalf of the internal host and then forwards it's own IP address instead of the Ip address o the internal host. Thus the IP address is hidden and is visible only to it's proximity. In simple terms you can hide the IP address using the proxy server, where your home network does not directly communicate with the server but through the Proxy server.

[Snake08]

There are several such proxy tools are available , both paid and free. So it is crystal clear that the paid will give you better performance than the free ones. There is a software tool developed by the Firefox named 'switchproxy'. These are the collection of proxies that are established in the web browsers , as the name suggests these proxies keep on changing among themselves and help in configuring and monitoring of interaction. Since security is your major concern , so apart from hiding the IP address you can also use some other techniques such as hiding your private messages by encrypting it, or you can you use firewalls that will not let the unauthorized packet to get inside a private network or you can you use Digital signature as well. But I think you should opt for any other method other than IP address hiding.