Can a hacker really do anything with your IP address?

An IP address won’t hand over your passwords, but it can give attackers somewhere to aim

By Husain Parvez Nov. 8, 2026 8:45 am EST Primakov/Shutterstock Add Engadget on Google: Google Discover

In November 2021, Twitch streamer xQc lost his internet connection shortly after playing "Crab Game." The game's developer then warned streamers to avoid public lobbies after discovering that the game could expose players' IP addresses to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Although xQc couldn't confirm an attack caused that specific outage, the developer soon switched to newer Steam networking to hide IP addresses.