Private IP Addresses.

[heepbigchief]

I have a question. Since private IP addresses are only employed on private networks and presumably a private IP address cannot access the internet and the outside cannot get in...

I recently retired a computer from internet access to being a stand alone computer and in order to try to find out what was making the thing so freaky (never found any malware type stuff on it) I was going over the packet logs.

That computer was under attack from a private IP address. That address would not accept ping or any other form of communication but they were certainly beating that poor comp to death but I don't know why. They knew what they were doing to because they had access to my firewall and disabled the password protected configuration settings and removed some blocked IP addresses. I GEOIP'd the private address and it showed that it was within a mile of my real world address.

Since I'm just a home user and not a bank or the Pentagon I can in any way ever fathom why some malicious would go as far as they did since the only thing I kept on the comp was the OS and some text files.

Now how is this possible unless a person was spoofing the IP address and knew or didn't know that it was a private IP address that they were spoofing?