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Cyber Security

How do streamers get swatted?

Asked by Asutosh Jha Mar 17, 2022 3.6K views 1 answer
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Swatting is when a person calls the SWAT team on a victim as a "prank", by falsely reporting some critical incident at the victim's home address. Swatting seems to be an incident that happens quite frequently to streamers in particular (e.g. Twitch.tv). However, in order for swatting to work, the home address of the victim must be known. While I accept that some people may inadvertently give out their home address on stream, with the number of cases that have occurred, I am wondering if perhaps the act of streaming somehow makes it easier to acquire a person's home address?


A few people have pointed out that you can trace the IP address of a streamer, and then do some additional research to find out a person's home. However, that seems unbelievable to me. For one, how does streaming leak a person's IP address? I thought that a streamer would upload their content to the streaming service (e.g. Twitch.tv) directly. Therefore unlike a P2P service such as Skype, the viewers do not need the IP Address of the streamer to watch the stream. Is that not true? Secondly, even if the IP Address is known, I still fail to see how one can determine the exact home address from that, since the IP address only gives a very rough approximation. Sure, some streamers give out their real name, and you can get an estimate of their gender/age/ethnicity based on their webcam footage, but is that really that much information?

Could someone expla in this to me? Is it true that streaming exposes your IP address? How can one determine someone's home address from this information? Finally, what can a streamer do to prevent their home address from being leaked out?

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