Forum Moderators: phranque
I've got a bit of a situation here dealing with a topic I'm not too knowledgeable in, and would appreciate some advice.
I currently run a large fansite for a popular online game. One of the ways in which I have successfully marketed the site is by providing extra content to users who bring in 10 referrals (10 unique IP addresses) to the site. The IP addresses each user has referred to the site are displayed in numeric order on within a user's profile. Some users have 1000s of referrals (and thus can see 1000s of IP addresses of the people they've referred), and some only have the required 10.
I recently had a user say that they were suddenly being DDOS attacked whenever my fansite would log their newest dynamic IP address.
So I suppose my question is: is it really that dangerous to publish user IP addresses on my fansite? I realize it may not be considered the most "ethical" thing for some people, but what I'm interested in is if people can actually be hacked (in some sense) from my action of publishing their IP address?
(And if the answer is yes, then how does one justify how online forums log the IP address of each of its users, and even provide more connections like identity/email address in which it would be even easier to target specific users for hacking?)
Many thanks for any advice! :)
If another gamer wanted, they could take any of the IP address you have visible and do a port scan looking for open connections to that person's computer. Or, try a denial of service attack or ICMP flood to any of the addresses.
I don't know of any forums off hand that have viewable user IP addresses. Yes, they log IPs, but they're only seen by administrators.
