Wednesday, 25 May 2016
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 asIntelius 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 visitwhois.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:
1.
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.
2.
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.
3.
Maximize the
privacy settings of your social network profiles. Make sure that your
individual albums and photographs have their privacy settings configured.
4.
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.
Is Doxing a
Crime?
Doxing is
definitely not a crime when used within the ethical standards and no harm is
being caused to anyone. However, if doxing is done to cause intentional damage
such as harassment, blackmailing or taking revenge it might well be considered
an offence.
