What is Doxing and How to Fight It?

The term doxing is breaking, collecting, and publishing information about someone previously confidential and sometimes difficult to obtain. The public availability of sensitive private documents can damage the reputation of any person or business. Therefore, it is necessary to take precautions by having information about this issue. This article contains information about what doxing is, its purpose and ways of protection.

Origin of Doxing

The term doxing is derived from the word a hacker for documents. The term first originated in the 1990s, when hackers killed a rival with a grudge. In this case, doxing focuses on detecting the hacker at his evil deeds and giving these details to the authorities and arresting him.

Purpose of Doxing

Doxing is a weapon and can be used for good or evil. However, it is mostly used as an attack method. The Anonymous movement and its partners on the 4Chan message board are particularly keen to use doxxing as a way of punishing enemies. 4Chan has millions of members, and a hate campaign against a celebrity or company leader on this site can be very devastating. Mob attacks initiated by 4chan include phone jokes, massive amounts of malicious emails, text messages, and even physical attacks on individuals.

What Do Hackers Look For When Doxing?

Hackers can collect full names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, photos, social security numbers, account numbers, etc. of individuals or organizations. They are trying to capture private and critical information. Doxing is a negative behavior as it is typically used as a means of coercion, blackmail, revenge or pursuit.

What Are Some Commonly Used Doxing Techniques?

Many people who save their personal information on online platforms give hackers more opportunities than ever to access their personal information. There are several techniques used to achieve this, and these techniques can be listed as follows:

Email hijacking is perhaps the most common method for hijacking someone’s private information. Once an email address is received, a hacker can try to break into the email account where the owner can access more sensitive information.

Google indexing opens the way to find information. Whenever Google indexes a web page stores a copy of all the information on that page, they have the chance to find this information easily, quickly and comprehensively. In most cases, all that is required from now on is for someone to use the relevant search words and phrases and have the details they are looking for at work.

Social networking sites are a real treasure trove of information. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and others have the personal details of hundreds of millions of people. When they provide every detail on their social media profile, especially if they haven’t educated themselves on privacy settings, they inadvertently lose their private life information to malicious people. Accessing this information increases the risk of harm.

Reverse phone lookup is another way for hackers to get details. Searching for a phone number by Google usually leads to a list of research services such as PeopleFinders.com, Intelius.com, WhitePages.com, and others that register the Internet for Personal information. For a few dollars, a hacker can pay to current and previous addresses, possible relatives, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, age, etc. can access.

A Whois lookup using website domain information can be used to find out who owns a particular domain name, when the domain was registered, when it expired, and the admin, billing and IT contacts for that domain. The results of this type of search are the names, addresses, email, phone numbers etc. provided when the domain name is registered. as it will provide almost all information.

A much more practical approach, social engineering is perhaps the most insidious and deceptive method of obtaining the sensitive information of a person or company. This involves a hacker contacting someone to extract sensitive information from them, usually through social networking sites.

How Should It Be Protected From Doxing?

It is possible to take some steps to protect you from abuse by online hackers and predators. The time spent on taking these measures is worth the trust these measures will bring. These measures are as follows:

Carefully configuring privacy settings to hide private information such as personal details and photos from search engines. If a site does not offer this protection, care should be taken not to share information on that site.

Different e-mail accounts must be used for different events. For example, an email should be used for gaming, a different email for banking, and a third email for forums. This way, the risk of sensitive information getting covered up is reduced.

Web albums should not be uploaded to social media sites or blogs. If required, photo search in search engines should be configured to hide in privacy settings so that only photos can be viewed by friends.

You should remove as much information as possible from sites like Intelius, and this can be done by going to the removal form for Intelius and requesting the removal. Some states, such as California, allow individuals to have greater control over their personal information due to laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.

Be careful about what is put on the web. The more selective a person is about what they share about themselves, the less likely it is that their private information will fall into the hands of malicious individuals. As a result, some information should not be shared on the internet in any way.

Important documents should be kept secure and a different password should be used for each important account. This can prevent hackers from guessing a password and then accessing everything owned using the same password. Keeping track of large numbers of passwords is difficult, so password storage software such as 1 Password and others can help keep them organized. But even this is not completely secure because they still need a password to enter the password storage software, and if someone guessed it, they could get all the information.

Passwords must be changed frequently, and these passwords should be done frequently, approximately every 60-90 days. However, less sensitive passwords can be changed less frequently.

If a politician, journalist, high net worth person, or is another high priority target for hackers, it may be necessary to take extra steps, such as using the TOR scanner. Or, it may be necessary to sign up for Google Advanced Protection because it locks out private information completely.

Doxxing or doxing is an online threat to privacy. Although it has existed in the trendy hacker community since the 1990s, it has now become a major threat to anyone using the internet. Doxxing involves researching the details of people’s lives. The purpose of this practice is to subject that person to legal prosecution, to embarrass the victim, to criticize or physically harm that person.

Many people’s lives are ruined by doxxing. Some doxxing attacks cause embarrassment to the community, the online equivalent of mobbing. Its effects can cause these people to lose their jobs, their families and even their homes. The targets of massive doxxing attacks were forced into hiding, deleting all their online accounts and changing their identities.