people get all freaked out about the idea of someone getting their public IP
I blame Steve Gibson for adding fuel to the fire on this. His advice stuck and why shouldn't it? He was a supposed security expert in the field.
Yeah he may have written a few interesting articles and given away a couple of handy tools for free, but he really went to town about IP disclosure and just downright scaring people saying "
Look here, your IP address is x.x.x.x. and your rDNS is x.x.x.x.abc.com" claiming
"It's really dangerous that so many websites know your IP"* He scratched the surface on rDNS but never offered potential ways of minimising risk.
20 years ago his site was extremely popular for doing quick port scan checks... people were getting DSL and using routers for the first time. Shields Up was probably one of the best places to go........
Except.. you landed on a page scaring you about potential risk because your IP and rdns available...... and then when you ran a test you failed because you had ICMP ping switched on. Most router manufacturers set this to ON by default. Vast numbers of problems materialised and some websites literally vanished off the face of the Internet.