Doxing - how to find out everything about a person without asking for anything

[Mutt]

What is doxing and what is it eaten with?
Doxing is a secret search for open and confidential information about a person, a group of people or an organization with the subsequent publication of the collected information in public sources. As a rule, doxing is carried out with the aim of revenge, blackmail (obtaining material gain) and persecution.

Doxxing is often used to punish people who would rather remain anonymous because of their conflicting beliefs or other illegal activities. A common tactic is to publicly disclose the identity of their victims, including their home address, telephone number, and even financial records. Thus, doxers provoke a wave of pressure and general negativity on a person or organization, which in turn can lead to irreparable consequences, sometimes with a fatal outcome.

Basic doxer tools for finding information

• Open sources - search engines, social networks, instant messengers, blogs, forums, chats and various kinds of Internet resources, where a person voluntarily uploads photos and videos, shares his stories, personal data, biography, publishes his interests, attitudes towards certain other things, political views, etc.
• Social engineering is a set of techniques, methods and technologies for creating such a space, conditions and circumstances that most effectively lead to a specific required result, using sociology and psychology.
• Hacking - in open sources it is possible to learn a lot about a person, but even more can be obtained by hacking his computer using malicious software. Depending on the degree of influence of the software, a hacker may have a full range of opportunities, for example, access to:
  • personal files on a technical device (photos, videos, music, notes, documents, etc.);
  • personal messages on social networks, instant messengers and other resources where users can communicate with each other;
  • accounts on various resources and platforms;
  • microphone and camera (the ability to remotely control, turn on and off);
  • remote control of a computer, etc .;
• Canarytokens is a decoy system that finds its use both against intruders and for them. A tracking token is generated and embedded in a link, document, letter, picture, etc. The token is transferred to the victim and when she interacts with it, i.e. views an image, opens a letter, file or document - the attacker finds out its IP address and location.

How can you prevent doxing?
Nowadays, it is quite difficult to disappear or hide your identity on the Internet, since logs (records in the database) of this or that resource about everything we do and wherever we go are formed.

Doxers collect, process and analyze data from various systems. If you value your anonymity and do not want the people you interact with on the Internet to suddenly knock on your door, change your role from a potential victim to an attacker, i.e. a docker. Use all the resources available to you and try to find as much information as possible about yourself on the Internet on your own. During the search (if possible) - remove redundant information. If this is not possible, change the privacy settings so that viewing information is available only for you. The existing methods and means of finding information about yourself are presented below:

Social media profiles
The main source of information for doxer is social networks, where you, perhaps some time ago or at the present time, post information about yourself, your interests, hobbies; where you can see the circle of your friends and acquaintances, where you can see your photos, music and videos - all the information together will allow:

• to form a complex image of your personality and status in society;
• find out what is most important in life and what priorities;
• determine the address where you live or most often visit;
• find out the phone number (yours, family members and close friends);
• download and save graphic materials (which will facilitate further information search).

Therefore, the first thing to start looking for information about yourself is to view all your profiles on social networks (VKontakte, Facebook, Odnoklassniki, My World, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, MySpace, etc.) that you are using now, registered back in school or student years, where they published information only in order to feel more significant among their peers, without thinking about how this information could be used against you.

When access to a long-forgotten profile is successfully obtained, delete all information that now causes nothing but shame in your head (contact information, personal information, messages, wall posts, etc.) and can be useful to a potential attacker. If the page is no longer relevant, delete it completely. If you are using it, change your privacy settings so that contact information, information, a list of friends are displayed only to you or to a limited number of users. When choosing the second option, revise your list of friends and acquaintances, because sometimes we add people completely unfamiliar to us, only because we liked a photograph of a person (for example, a beautiful girl), but it cannot be said reliably, a girl on the other side of the screen or a 40th man in sweatpants and holding a beer, collecting a database for doxing. Of course, the restriction for access to this or that information is not suitable for everyone, because different spheres of activity and for someone publicity is one of the necessary factors in his activities.

For space and optimization of the entire process, Yandex has a service for finding people across all social networks at once. All you need:

1. indicate the last name, first name, patronymic of the person;
2. select one or more social networks for search;
3. press the "Find" button;
4. specify additional search parameters (if necessary).

As a result, you will see a search page with a list of social networks, where a match was found for the specified parameters.

Profiles in chats, forums, blogs and other Internet resources
Social media is not the only tool for finding information. At a certain period of time, each of us is fond of different things, so you may also have accounts:

• on dating sites (Mamba, Jolly, Badoo, Rusdate, Loveplanet, Mylove, Loverium, Topface, Teamo, Edarling, Tinder, Nekto, etc.);
• on forums, blogs and portals of your city or country;
• on forms of interest (travel, sports, cars, IT, programming, hacking, advertising, games, films, music, etc.);
• on sites with reviews, questions and tests (Ask.fm, etc.);
• in online diaries (LiveJournal, Fragmenter.net, etc.)

All this together is an invaluable storehouse of information. For example, when communicating on forums, and if it has been for several years, you do not even need to directly say where you live. Instead, you can roughly determine the location by exclusion. For example, you make a message that you do not live in Ukraine. Next time they wrote that you want to visit another city indicating its name. In the third topic, it was reported that in your city there is a chain of stores under a certain brand, which is not in other cities. As the docker continues to sift through the information, he slowly figures out which country and city you live in.

Try to remember or find exactly where you registered, filled out questionnaires, wrote comments and left your feedback. The more you find such resources, the less chances doxers have.

Accounts in messengers, programs and applications
The modern world has largely plunged into software for mobile devices and messengers Telegram, Viber, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and others are on the top, but once programs such as qip, icq, miranda and others had all the glory - if you find it time, you probably don't remember them anymore, but they remember you well.

Everything that was once indicated by you in contacts, personal information about yourself, statuses, is still stored in the database of these programs. I believe that restoring access to this software is something beyond the realm, but it's worth a try. Of course, it is better to remove everything that is in the public domain for public viewing or restrict access to viewing.

All of this applies not only to software of its former glory, but also to modern software. All of the above messengers, plus to this: Skype, Discord, Steam, RaidCall and other resources where there was or is an opportunity to get information about you, should be reviewed and adjusted so that the information is not available to potential attackers.

Search in search engines
Tautology, friends, I'm sorry, but this is an extremely important point, since search engines play a decisive role in our life. Our interaction with the virtual world takes place through search engines, somewhere to a greater extent, somewhere to a lesser extent, but it is difficult to imagine the Internet without them.

When we have any question, we go to Google or Yandex and form an appropriate request. To search for information about yourself, enter your first name, last name and patronymic, try just the first and last name or just the last name. Combine different query options, add:

• City of residence;
• school Number;
• The name of the university;
• the name of the organization where you work;
• E-mail address;
• phone number, etc.

The more different query options you try, the more chances you will find all the sources where they have ever been noted or attended. Also, do not limit only Google or Yandex, since there are still a lot of other search engines (Yahoo, Rambler, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Baidu, etc.) that have their own algorithms and, possibly, will show additional resources containing information about You.

Search by narrowly targeted attributes
Each of us has a number of parameters and characteristics that are an integral part of our life and can be used against us. You, like an attacker, can try:

• find a person by photo (upload your photo and search through special sites or programs);
• find a person by phone number in social networks (due to the fact that there is an urgent need for two-factor authentication, the phone now requests almost every Internet resource where we register. This information is not always closed and allows us to be identified by other people);
• find a person by phone number in messengers (if in some social networks it is possible to register without a phone number, then in messengers this is not possible, which also makes us vulnerable to search);
• find a person by nickname (we use the username in games, social networks, instant messengers, forums, blogs and any other sites - this is an attribute that allows us to almost unambiguously identify, since we use the same nickname on all resources. Of course, This is not always possible, because sometimes nicknames coincide with other people and we have to go to various kinds of tricks (adding symbols, numbers or words). Nevertheless, most often we have one nickname for all Internet activities, which greatly simplifies the search task for the docker);
• analyze metadata (every file, document and photo has metadata, which may include GPS coordinates and device parameters. Therefore, if you have published a photo anywhere, you can use metadata to determine where it was taken and on which device).

Information leakage control
There is a wonderful project “haveibeenpwned” on the Internet, with the help of which you can find out if your email address has been noticed among mass hacks and information leaks.

Whois
If you are the owner of a website, blog, forum or any other Internet resource and have registered a domain, then you understand that this cannot be done without specifying personal data. Therefore, when registering a domain, it is worth taking care that the data is not publicly available. Otherwise, any Internet user can use Whois services to find out your contact information (email address, first name, last name, residential address, etc.)

If the function of hiding personal data is used, the search through the Whois service will lead to the fact that in the corresponding columns it will be displayed that the owner of the site is “Private Person”.

It is possible to hide the data when registering a domain by checking the corresponding box, or by contacting the registrar to clarify the information, what to do in your case.

Check Google Tracking Settings
You should change the tracking settings, because in the event of a hacked account, all interactions with Google will become available to the attacker over the years.

Sign in - Google Accounts

You can say that you are safe from doxing because you have nothing to hide. But is it?

You don't have to do something immoral or illegal. It's just that everyone has some aspects of life that they would prefer to keep secret. These aspects may be completely harmless, but they must remain personal.

When it comes to anonymity and confidentiality, you just need to carefully monitor what you post and report on the Internet.