How do hackers find your exact location when an external IP only gives a rough estimate of the area?
There are various means hackers can know your exact location.
- They are looking at you directly.
- They are watching you via a camera. (Some locations have lots of cameras.[1] )
- They have your smartphone compromised, and are receiving GPS data, or a set of magnetic field measurements or a set of snapshots or any of the other sensor data that a cell phone can collect from which your actual position can be determined, especially if this data is simply a delta from a known location; your accellerometer telling you how many paces you’ve walked is just one example of a side channel leakage that can lead to your location being exposed; the gyroscope and altimeter readings are sources that can be correlated.[2]
- There are bugs or sensors deployed that can detect when sounds or keystrokes corresponding to you are activated. (e.g. if you use your credit or debit card, the location of the device which read your card is known, and the timestamp of your spending the funds places you at that location at a known time).[3] If information about your name/address is correlated with smart apps, smart tv, online subscriptions, etc., then these sources can help locate you when you manually use them.
- They are tracking the cellular data usage of your phone, tablet, or car[4] ,whose identifiers they have previously ascertained, by radio-frequency monitoring or by triangulation from cell phone data obtained from cell towers or roaming/fixed vans or other monitoring points. This also works for tracking a phone if Wi-Fi is enabled, as the phone periodically may check for local access points—this probe can be detected at each access point and signal strength can be used to triangulate your position, even without having you connect to any of these points or having your phone compromised, so if the person has this information from having received access at those access points, then they can determine your location.[5]
Remember: Just because a person is a computer hacker doesn’t mean that they can only perform actions using some technological exploit on your device which would be limited to only an IP address and socket connection time.
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