Is Grabify Safe
I clicked a Grabify link. Is my phone hacked now? – Information …
TL;DR: Don’t worry, your phone is not hacked.
Essentially they send you a tracking link and they know from which IP address this linked was accessed. They then can match this IP address to your ISP, and might infer a more or less precise location depending on how your ISP assigns IP addresses. This is the kind of information which are visible by any website your visit, i. e. these are not actually secret private information. While the attacker could for example try to DDoS you it is likely more to just scare you in this case. Don’t be scared.
You can try yourself what the “attacker” and also any website you visit can see. Just create your own link at grabify, visit it and check the result.
I’ve tried myself and for example the location is way off (another town) and the claimed device name is actually only its IP address again. Not actually impressive and nothing to worry about. Depending on the capabilities of your device this might also include the battery level etc. Again, these information are not really secret but might be used to scare you since you don’t expect the “attacker” to know this and wonder what else they know. Best check yourself.
I clicked on a grabify link and I don’t know if it installed a virus
I think my firewall on my router is alright, is that enough to prevent them from doing anything with my IP?
No.
Let us look at the whole operation in slow motion. You clicked on a link, which tells your browser “Go there and activate whatever you find”. The there is website, which can both run code to e. g. determine what browser you’re using and where you’re coming from (and react accordingly) and send your browser instructions.
So, the fact that an antivirus, or someone else, or a different browser, or even you half an hour later, found nothing suspicious on the target website, means little.
Moreover, some of those “instructions” could be a simple redirect, that sends the browser on to another website (and again, this might happen only the first time, or just at a given hour, or with certain browsers, etc. ), and so on.
In all this, the firewall never enters the equation because the connection was originated by you (clicking on the link). Some, more advanced firewalls may perform more or less deep packet inspection to prevent you from e. downloading a known virus – a virus that the firewall has been updated to recognize.
That is why you also need an updated antivirus on whatever machine your browser runs on.
Then your antivirus should also have system inspection capabilities (so-called behavioral guard) so that an unknown malicious code can be recognized and blocked by the fact that it is doing something recognizedly malicious, something suspicious, something unusual, or just something forbidden on general grounds (e. writing a file or trying to execute a file downloaded to the browser object cache, or checking whether an antivirus is running, and so on).
So far, everything has behaved as expected: the browser browsed, the firewall firewalled.
Unfortunately there may be bugs (vulnerabilities) in both the browser and the firewall. Only the second kind require knowledge of your IP; the first require reliably recognizing your browser (which is why some “security packages” rewrite the User-Agent and other information to make your browser look different from what it is). A malicious website that recognized you as using Google Chrome 78 might send an exploit that would likely be harmless against Firefox 56, and vice versa.
The firewall might have the same kind of vulnerability to a targeted attack. This usually happens when the firewall’s configuration is accessible from the outside (some firewalls are configured that way to allow technicians or ISPs to more easily help you). Or the administration functions might be insufficiently protected against authentication forgeries; or someone from the outside might be able to trick your browser into sending the firewall specific commands that, coming from the inside, might be obeyed blindly (this is called a XSS, or cross-site-scripting, attack). You prevent these by keeping routers and firewalls updated, with robust passwords, and locked against outside access. Setting them to unusual internal addresses might help, very little.
So, the first line of defense would have been to check the grabify URL using the grabify expander, or try just googling it. Then, there are extensions that allow to block redirects until you manually confirm them (you can whitelist some sites, of course). So if you see a redirect to some funnily-named site that looks like a fire-and-forget malware haven, you have a chance to verify the URL.
There are also online services that allow scanning a URL to verify it is clean, but keep in mind that the target website might choose to send a clean response if it detects that the asker is a known security scanner, or does not look like a trusting browser.
Then, you have firewall, antivirus, and full and adequate backups.
And, of course, any “serious” navigation ought to take place from a separate user account, OS partition, system, sandbox, virtual machine or better yet, physical device (I’ve lost count of people lending their laptops to their kids to attend Covid19-safe “video school”, and discovering their home banking credentials have leaked).
What is an IP-logger and how to protect yourself from it. – GAMEMUD
1. What is an IP-logger and how to protect yourself from it. 2. How to protect yourself. 3. Conclusion. What is an IP-logger and how to protect yourself from wadays, internet security is almost everything. In this blog you will learn how to protect yourself from dangerous sites on the web. It is known that less than 5% of the network is safe. The remaining 95% are distributed in the deep and dark web. But there are many gaps and dangers in the safe internet. Some of the dangers are a number of viruses, IP-loggers, trackers and many others scattered on the internet. In the internet, anyone without basic knowledge can be vulnerable. So let’s start with an IP-logger. IP-logger can be hidden in any internet link, but now we will explain how to distinguish them. The links hidden in the IP-loggers have unusual characters and often do not matter, like this:: // of course this link is not real, but it is a current example of IP-Logger, there is an illogical arrangement of letters and numbers, and the domain is not one of the traditional,, and others. IP loggers often lead to social networks, photos, songs, video sharing platforms and many other sites. IP-loggers are dangerous because they collect information about your device such as IP, your location, intercepted by the GPS on your phone, what type of device you have, what operating system the device has, etc. But through this information you can be attacked with DDoS attack and many others. How to protect erefore, it is advisable to have an antivirus program and of course to be careful on the internet by carefully reviewing the web’s link, and if you still want to know what is on the link, use VPN services, because VPN services change the IP of your device with another IP offered by the VPN application, the advantages of VPN services are the following: it changes your IP and so your traffic remains practically hidden, and IP loggers will not catch your real IP, also we are recommend you to using an application that changes your location like GAMEMUD FakeGPS. Also through GAMEMUD FakeGPS you have the opportunity to choose such a location that you want in practice each by entering the coordinates in both fields, the other advantage is that the size of the application is only 1 megabyte and is valid on Google Play. with any VPN app and GAMEMUD FakeGPS you become completely anonymous on the web. Through these applications, not only your IP has been changed, but also your location, which is big advantage in the Internet environment today. You will find a link for GAMEMUD FakeGPS. In the next blog you’ll learn what trackers are and how to protect yourself from out the post on what are web trackers here. -GAMEMUD Team
Frequently Asked Questions about is grabify safe
Does Grabify give viruses?
Links don’t install viruses. The website you land on does. However, the site you end up landing on might be just the last site in a chain. It is possible that you passed through multiple sites to get to the last one and each one might have tried to do, well, anything.Apr 27, 2021
Is Grabify malicious?
link is a URL shortener and IP grabber that allows users to shorten a URL through a variety of custom URLs and view the IPs of users that have visited the shortened URL. The website can be used for malicious purposes like denial of service attacks.Feb 26, 2021
Is IP Logger dangerous?
IP-loggers are dangerous because they collect information about your device such as IP, your location, intercepted by the GPS on your phone, what type of device you have, what operating system the device has, etc. But through this information you can be attacked with DDoS attack and many others.Nov 28, 2020
