In the modern world, the Internet has become a great place to gain knowledge, exchange ideas, share information, make new friends and whatnot. Although, you can do all this by remaining anonymous behind your screen, your real-life identity and personal information could still be at risk of falling into the hands of strangers. . This is where the term ” doxing “Come play!
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What is doxing?
Doxing simply the process of gathering information or making inferences about others such as name, age, email, address, phone number, picture, etc. using public sources such as the Internet. In other words, doxing is the practice of using the Internet to find personal information about a person.
Doxing is done by initially taking a piece of information (such as “name” or “email address”) and keeping it as a basis for finding out other possible details about the person. The term “doxing” is derived from the word “document tracing” which means to obtain documents about a particular person or company to learn more about them.
Doxing Technique:
Today, the Internet has grown to such a size that it contains almost any information you have ever imagined! All you have to do is use the right technique to search for what you want. Here is a list of the most commonly used doxing techniques by Internet geeks and ethical hackers:
Using Google:
Google is certainly a powerful tool that plays an important role in doxing. Since Google indexes almost anything on the Internet (sometimes even personal information), it’s possible to DOX for details like a person’s email ID, address, phone number and picture. or company. Once you have the search results for your query, carefully examine the description which in many cases contains the piece of information you are looking for.
Social networking site:
Since most Internet users are found to be active on social media, social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn provide a virtual goldmine of information needed to perform doxing. As most users are not aware of network security issues, they have weak security settings in their profile. This makes it easy for attackers to gain access to personal information such as photos, real names, locations, jobs, partners’ names, etc.
Reverse Cell Phone Lookup:
One ” Reverse Cell Phone Lookup “ is simply a process of finding someone’s personal details such as name, age, address and related information using their cell phone number and vice versa. There are many online services out there like Intelius provides access to personal information about a given person based on her/her phone, his name and email ID.
Who is:
If a person or a company already has a website (or domain) linked to them, you can easily do a “whois search” for their website to get personal information like 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 display all the details related to the domain name.
Why Do Hackers Perform Doxing?
Most people perform the doxing out of general curiosity about a person or company. However, there are some evil thoughts out there who do this for the purpose of blackmail or revenge by exposing the information they have gathered about that person.
What are the consequences of Doxing?
It can be somewhat frustrating and embarrassing when personal data falls into the hands of people who do not intend to have access to it. However, things can go even worse if doxed information such as a person’s social activities, medical history, sexual preferences and other important bits of information are made public. . This could have a serious threat to the victim’s health, livelihood or relationship.
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:
- First and last name
- Age, gender and date of birth
- Location and place of birth
- email address and username
- Phone number
- Social networking profiles, websites and blogs
So it’s always a good practice to keep the upper bits of information hidden. Although 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 pictures on album sites like “Picasa”. Even if you do, make sure your albums are hidden from the tools and search engines.
- If you do not intend to display your profile on search engines, it is a wise choice to make all Internet profiles private.
- Maximize the privacy settings of your social networking sites. Make sure your albums and profile pictures have their privacy settings configured.
- Do not use the same email address for all your accounts. Instead, create separate email IDs for personal activities like gaming, participating forums, bank accounts, etc.
Is Doxing a Crime?
Doxing is certainly not a crime when used within ethical standards and no harm is done to anyone. However, if doxing is done to cause intentional harm such as harassment, intimidation or retaliation it can also be considered an offence.
