Can a IP address be hacked or stolen or found on an iPhone without permission?

Hello and welcome to Apple Support Communities Throwawayaccount123,

Thank you for contacting us. You have come to the right place and we are happy to assist you. We understand you're inquiring about VPN and hackers.   We can understand why you’d reach out for a solution. To start, make sure you have the most current operating system on your device. (Settings > General > Software Update) This is one key factor in keeping your device secured. A VPN does hide your address as well, and sometimes can cause interference with some sites. Below is a link about VPN's.

Intro to VPN with Apple

Thank you for contacting Apple Support Communities.

Best regards.

If your question is actually: Can using a VPN completely hide my iPhone's IP address? Then the answer is no. At best, your iPhone's communication over the Internet would only be "secure" through the VPN tunnel to the VPN service provider's servers. This still leaves two potential areas for communications to be intercepted: 1) At the VPN provider's servers, and 2) On the Internet between those servers and the desired end-point servers for that communication.

A VPN is basically a proxy. The VPN provider can "see" all of your traffic, and can do whatever they want with it. That includes logging it ... even if they state that they don't. If someone wants to tap into your connection, they can still do so. They just have to do so at a different point ... like when your traffic leaves the VPN server. One important thing to keep in mind: A VPN cannot encrypt your traffic; it only passes it through a "secure" tunnel. Your iPhone's IP address is largely an irrelevant metric in this whole process.

An IP address cannot be hacked or “stolen”. An IP address is public information, and nothing you do can change the fact that it is public. Using VPN you can change who can see your IP address, but it is still visible to your VPN provider, cellular provider and ISP (if you are on Wi-Fi). But there is no risk in someone knowing your iPhone's IP address, either.

Where there IS a risk is many of the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices around the world, and that you might have. This includes home automation devices (TVs, appliances, security cameras, baby monitors, etc). Most of these have very poor security and are easily hacked. And there is no way to hide their IP addresses; if you could they wouldn’t work.