March 16, 2014
What is Doxing and How it is Done?
In
the modern world, Internet has become a wonderful place to gain
knowledge, exchange ideas, share information, make new friends and
whatnot. Even though, you can do all of this by remaining anonymous
behind your monitor, your real life identity and personal details can
still be at the risk of falling into the hands of strangers. This is
where the term “doxing” comes into play!What is Doxing?
Doxing
simply refers to the process of gathering or deducing other people’s
information such as name, age, email, address, telephone number,
photographs etc. using publicly available sources such as the Internet.
In other words, doxing is the act of using the Internet to search for
personal details about a person.
Doxing is done by initially taking a
piece of information (such as “name” or “email address”) and keeping it
as a base to find out other possible details about the person. The term
“doxing” is derived from the word “document tracing” which means to
retrieve documents about a particular person or company in order to
learn more about them.
Doxing Techniques:
Today, Internet has grown to such a size
that it contains almost any information that you’ve ever imagined! All
you’ve to do is use the right techniques to search for what you want.
Here is a list of doxing techniques that are most commonly used by
Internet geeks and ethical hackers:
Using Google:
Google is undoubtedly a powerful tool
that plays a key role in doxing. Since Google indexes almost anything on
the Internet (sometimes even the private information), it is possible
to dox for details such as email ID, address, phone numbers and
photographs of a person or company. Once you obtain the search results
for your query, carefully examine the description part which in most
cases contain the piece of information that you are looking for.
Social Networking Websites:
As most Internet users are found to be
active on social media, social networking sites such as Facebook and
LinkedIn provide a virtual goldmine of information necessary to perform
doxing. As most users are unaware of online security issues, they have
weak privacy settings on their profile. This makes it easy for the
attackers to gain access to personal information such as photographs,
real names, location, job, partner’s name etc.
Reverse Cell Phone LookUp:
A “Reverse Cell Phone Lookup”
is simply a process of finding someone’s personal details such as name,
age, address and related information by using their cell phone number
and vice versa. There are many online services out there such as cell phone registry that provide access to the personal details about a given person based on his/her phone, name and email ID.
Whois Searches:
If a person or company has a website (or
domain name) associated with them, you can easily perform a “whois
search” for their website to obtain personal details such as full name,
address, email and phone number. Just visit whois.domaintools.com
and enter the domain name for which you want to perform a whois search.
It will show up all the details associated with the domain name.
Why Would Anyone Want to Perform Doxing?
Most people perform doxing out of
general curiosity about a person or company. However, there are some
wicked minds out there who do this for the purpose of blackmailing or
taking revenge by exposing the information that they have gathered about
the person.
What are the Consequences of Doxing?
It can be slightly irritating and
embarrassing when private data fall in the hands of people who are not
intended to have access to such information. However, things can go even
worse if the doxed information such as a person’s social activities,
medical history, sexual preference and other vital bits of information
is made public. This can have a serious threat to health, livelihood or
relationship of the victim.
Steps to Protect Yourself from Doxing:
The following are some of the most commonly targeted pieces of information that can be easily obtained through doxing:
- Full name
- Age, gender and date of birth
- Location and place of birth
- Email addresses and username
- Phone number
- Social networking profiles, websites and blogs
So, it is always a good practice to keep
the above bits of information hidden. Even though it is not possible to
do this in all cases, you can still take care to protect as much
information as you can from going public. You can consider the following
additional tips for further protection:
- Do not upload personal photographs on web albums such as “Picasa”. Even if you do, make sure that your album is hidden from public and search engines.
- If you do not intend to show up your profile on search engines, it is a wise choice to make all the Internet profiles private.
- Maximize the privacy settings of your social network profiles. Make sure that your individual albums and photographs have their privacy settings configured.
- Do not use the same email address for all you accounts. Instead, create separate email IDs for individual activities such as gaming, forum participation, banking accounts etc.
