Question An update regarding my mystery networking tech issue.

[couldntthinkofausername]

In May of this year, I made a post in this forum about the mysterious tech issue I am experiencing (Here is a link to the post: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...ech-issue-and-i-dont-know-what-it-is.3764850/). That discussion ended with neither me nor the awesome members of this site being able to determine what was causing me to experience the networking tech issue I said I was having in that post and a solution to it.



After that discussion ended with no solution found, I browsed the login portal website for my AT&T U-verse residential gateway and found out that my home wifi network has been getting hit by dos attacks as of recent (How I learned that is I went to the Logs page on the login portal website of my U-verse residential gateway and saw that some of the log entries said "other dos attack" a lot on it along with the IP addresses the dos attacks have been coming from; Note: The reason why I did not put screenshots of the entries in this post is because of the fact that IP addresses are personal information and the fact that those entries had the IP addresses belonging to hackers (A.K.A the source IP addresses) & my IP address (A.K.A the destination IP address) right next to each other.).


After wondering how the hacker that is dos attacking my home wifi network and attacking my tech devices got my IP address, it dawned on me that the hacker probably sent me a link on social media that had an IP grabber/IP logger built into it, found out what my IP address was after I clicked on it while not knowing that it had an IP grabber in it, scanned the ports that are associated with my IP address, and got remote access to my tech devices & was able to start dos attacking my home wifi network that way (With that being said, the individual who was in that discussion and said that a computer virus is not what is causing me to have my mysterious networking tech issue was right.).





A few days after I came to the conclusion that how I started experiencing networking tech problems & started experiencing dos attacks was that someone had found out what my IP address was using an IP grabber and conducted a port scan on my IP address, I said to myself that packet loss from the back-to-back dos attacks I am experiencing are probably what are causing me to notice a bunch of content is missing on the web for me (including content on social media sites).



Now that know how that hacker got my IP address, I am trying to ban the IP addresses the hacker or hackers is using so that my home wifi network will no longer be dos attacked and my tech devices will no longer experience the tech issues I talked about in the discussion that is at the link above.



The problem is that I don't know how to block ip addresses and I am afraid that if I was to try to block the IP addresses that are dos attacking my home wifi network, then I would end up blocking IP addresses that are innocent by mistake.



Are there any computer programs that will automatically block ip addresses for someone who doesn't know how to block ip addresses?

 

[couldntthinkofausername]

By the way, I forgot to say in my post that what is happening to me is a case of mistaken identity. I have no idea why the folks who are hacking me are hacking me. They are hacking the wrong individual.

 

[bill001g]

The router manufactures need to stop being lazy and just logging these general messages. It is not likely a real DDOS attack. No matter who you are you constantly get scans. The hackers scan every possible IP even if you have never posted it anyplace. The message should be port scan detected and blocked.

In general it is not done enough to have any effect. Unless you have a very slow DSL connection a scan you will never affect you. It is takes only a very small amount of bandwidth to scan every possible port.

A real DDOS attack is highly unlikely. First you can not do it from just a single IP address. Most people would DoS themselves by exceeding their upload rate before they could use all the bandwidth to exceed the download rate of the person they were attacking. This is why it is called a "distributed" dos attack. You must get multiple most times 100's of machines and send traffic to the target IP. The only real way to do this is to pay money to a service to rent their network of machines. Since these machines are fairly quickly found and patched it tends to be rather expensive to rent this even for a hour. If someone hates you enough to spent money to attack you then you have a very huge problem that goes beyond computer hacking.

Nobody is going to run dos attacks against some random home IP. The scans you see are attempting to take over machines so they can use them to say mine crypto currency or maybe attempt to steal banking information. These are people who try to make money by hacking not to waste their time attacking someone just to irritate them.

Your problem is real DDOS attacks are very effective. The new version of overwatch has been DDOS a couple times and has take the game offline for hours at a time. When a huge game company can't really stop it a single home user can do nothing. The game company can work with their ISP to attempt to block the traffic from these IP but even for ISP it is very hard. Even if it is a real DDOS your ISP will not care as long as it does not also affect their network. This requires them to make changes in many of their core routers and firewalls which can affect their whole network if they make a mistake, they are not going to take the risk for one home user. If you cancel your service because of it they lose less money than making a mistake that takes down large parts of their network.

I again suspect you are reading messages in the router and being scared into believing them rather that just ignoring them since all the traffic is being blocked and you can't do anything about it anyway.

 

[couldntthinkofausername]

The router manufactures need to stop being lazy and just logging these general messages. It is not likely a real DDOS attack. No matter who you are you constantly get scans. The hackers scan every possible IP even if you have never posted it anyplace. The message should be port scan detected and blocked.

In general it is not done enough to have any effect. Unless you have a very slow DSL connection a scan you will never affect you. It is takes only a very small amount of bandwidth to scan every possible port.

A real DDOS attack is highly unlikely. First you can not do it from just a single IP address. Most people would DoS themselves by exceeding their upload rate before they could use all the bandwidth to exceed the download rate of the person they were attacking. This is why it is called a "distributed" dos attack. You must get multiple most times 100's of machines and send traffic to the target IP. The only real way to do this is to pay money to a service to rent their network of machines. Since these machines are fairly quickly found and patched it tends to be rather expensive to rent this even for a hour. If someone hates you enough to spent money to attack you then you have a very huge problem that goes beyond computer hacking.

Nobody is going to run dos attacks against some random home IP. The scans you see are attempting to take over machines so they can use them to say mine crypto currency or maybe attempt to steal banking information. These are people who try to make money by hacking not to waste their time attacking someone just to irritate them.

Your problem is real DDOS attacks are very effective. The new version of overwatch has been DDOS a couple times and has take the game offline for hours at a time. When a huge game company can't really stop it a single home user can do nothing. The game company can work with their ISP to attempt to block the traffic from these IP but even for ISP it is very hard. Even if it is a real DDOS your ISP will not care as long as it does not also affect their network. This requires them to make changes in many of their core routers and firewalls which can affect their whole network if they make a mistake, they are not going to take the risk for one home user. If you cancel your service because of it they lose less money than making a mistake that takes down large parts of their network.

I again suspect you are reading messages in the router and being scared into believing them rather that just ignoring them since all the traffic is being blocked and you can't do anything about it anyway.

Bill001g, this tech issue I am having is really mysterious. Another thing I want to say is my Reddit account was not suspended on November 23rd, 2021 (The day when I started experiencing the tech issue this thread of mine is about.).



The reason why I said that I was not suspended on that day is because I learned that usually, when someone is automatically logged out of their Reddit account like I was on that day, it is because their Reddit account was suspended.



When I logged back into my Reddit account right after I was automatically logged out of my Reddit account while I was browsing Reddit using the Reddit is fun Android app, I opened up the Firefox web browser on my smartphone, went to the desktop version of the Reddit website on it, logged into Reddit using the desktop version of the Reddit website, and didn't see anything at the top of the site saying that I was suspended from it.



Aside from doing that, I also logging into the email account that is associated with the email address that I used to create my Reddit account to see if there was an email in my email inbox saying that my Reddit account was suspended and I didn't see one in it.



With that being said, the networking tech issue I am experiencing is mysterious.


On the first day when I started experiencing the tech issue this thread is about, I made a mistake and said to myself that it could be a bug that Reddit is having.




By the way, another thing I should note is that when I search something up using Twitter's search bar on the mobile version of the Twitter website and look at all of the search results tweets until the search results page abruptly stops loading tweets while knowing that there more tweets to be loaded, I go to the settings menu, and exit back out of it to see that more tweets are suddenly loaded (This is another thing that has been happening since November 23rd, 2021.).



This tech issue I am experiencing is just strange.

 

[bill001g]

None of that is a DOS attack. It means exactly that denial of service. The attack does not compromise web pages or logins etc it purely is designed to block your internet connection so you can't use it at all. Almost as though someone would come to your house and cut the wire.
It does not affect how web sites run or accounts on web sites.

 

[nigelivey]

Is this really still a thing and another wall of text? You arent being "hacked" you aren't being "DDOS" attacked, your router is doing its job, anybodies logs would look like that. Your IP address is trivial.

 

[couldntthinkofausername]

It's me again. I'm reviving this old thread. The reason why I am reviving this old thread is because my tech issue still hasn't been fixed. A few days ago, I made a r/techsupport post talking about it. You can view it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1604o0k/a_mysteriousweird_technical_issue_that_i_have/. Not only did I put imgur links to images I made of my tech issue in it but I also had put imgur links to videos I made of my tech issue in it. Since I now created videos of my tech issue, you guys might be able to solve it now unlike last time. Please read the r/techsupport post I made and help me solve it. Thank you.

 

[Ralston18]

Whatever was posted in reddit seems to have been removed.

And has been previously posted, it is very unlikely that you are being personally targeted.

If there are search issues with Twitter then contact Twitter for assistance.

Likewise, if you feel that the issue is a Reddit "bug" then contact Reddit.

Also, you mentioned that you consider IP addresses as personal information. That does not apply to the "private" IP address ranges reserved for small home and business networks.

(My router/gateway uses 192.168.1.1 as do many other thousands of routers.)

FYI:

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-private-ip-address-2625970

What you do not want to reveal is the IP address assigned by your ISP to your Router/Gateway.

Which can be discovered by you via Google by searching "What is my IP"? Do not give away that IP address.

Do the following:

Contact Twitter and Reddit for assistance.

Check your network for the make and model of your modem and router.

Run "ipconfig /all" (without quotes) via the Command Prompt.

If you have images of the issues then post the images via imgur (www.imgur.com) as it appears that you have done before.

Then begin a new thread with an updated statement of the issue(s) and include all of the above information.

(Note: You should be able to copy and paste the results of "ipconfig /all" without needing to retype it all.)

There may be other questions and information requested thereafter.

Closing this necro thread accordingly.