A hacker will use any methods to detect and obtain the information of a computer and decide the most effective way to invade this computer. Let's see how a hacker obtains the most basic information of a computer: the IP address and how to protect your IP address from being found.

IP is the identity of any online computers and the first valuable information a hacker tries to know. There are a lot of methods to obtain an IP address. In a LAN, we can use 'ping' command to obtain the IP address of a LAN computer by pinging the host name of this computer. The ultimate method may be capture and analyze the network data packet. An ordinary computer user may find hard to understand the data. For an experienced and well trained hacker, however, he can analyze the data and extract the IP address information from the packet.

A computer user could also use a variety of methods to protect the IP address from being revealed. The answer to data packet capture and analysis is to install tool software which can remove your IP address information from the data packet. But this method could bring some negative effects, such as the system resource will be consumed, the computer will be slowed down and you may not be able to access some websites or online forums. The most popular and efficient method to hide the IP address is using an agent to access the internet. Using an agent can hide your real IP address from malicious hackers and disable the data packet capture and analysis method. However, using an agent also has some disadvantages. For example, it may bring down your internet accessing speed. Although using an agent can effectively hide the IP, a skilled hacker can still find ways to find the real IP address by passing through the agent. So how to protect the IP address from being found really depends on different situations.