Doxxing
Definition & description
Doxxing is the act of tracking down someone's personal and private information including their given names, home address, workplace, phone number, etc., and circulating them in digital spaces with the malicious intent to embarrass, shame, or cause or incite violence against the victim.
Today, much of our personal and private information is available online. While in many cases, this information i.e. our email address, a picture of our bedroom, current employment, etc can be viewed as harmless and benign, they can be maliciously pieced together and published online. Especially, when it is attached to unsavoury allegations and incitement, it can increase the likelihood of danger.
Doxxing is not to be taken lightly as it can escalate to more severe harm like mob attacks, physical or in-person violence or the harassment may be extended to members of your community. Your political stances or identities can be weaponised against you to amplify the threats.
Incident response: What do I do?
Report it. Report the dox to the platform where your information is shared. This is to stop the further spreading of your personal information. Mobilise your friends and community to report it too. Find out more on reporting to social media here.
Deactivate or lock all your social media accounts. Make a list of all your online accounts and decide which one to make private or lock or deactivate temporarily. It will help to limit further access to your personal information. You may want to consider locking down all your accounts temporarily and inform people you trust on ways they can contact you.
Check accounts that you may have forgotten you signed up for. Deleting inactive accounts may be necessary to prevent aggressors from locating you. Your old accounts may compromise your security especially if they used an older or a similar password. If you no longer used these platforms, be on the safe side and shut them down.
Check your accounts here.
Strengthen your locks. You may want to consider changing all your passwords to prevent others from intruding and hacking your information. Opt for long, strong and unique passwords and use two-factor authentication where it is possible.
Learn more about how you can create and maintain strong password here:
Doxing yourself. To ensure your private information is not sprawled out on the internet, sometimes it helps to try and dox yourself. You know yourself best!
Stay safe. If your location has been compromised or exposed, move to somewhere you feel safe. You may need to temporarily relocate to a hotel or a friend’s place. Tell someone you trust about your location (ideally through an encrypted channel like Signal or a secret channel on Telegram).
Monitor. Find a way to monitor the incidents so you can assess your risk and decide the next move. If it is too much, ask a friend to monitor your accounts and the relevant platforms.
Document it. There are many ways to document it; screen capturing the messages or content, saving the relevant links, saving a screen capture of your complaints, etc. Make sure the screen captures are inclusive of the date of the attack. If you consider reporting to law enforcement, your documentation would be very useful. If it is too much to handle, ask someone you trust to assist.
If you are up for it, create an incident log to document patterns of attacks. This can be useful to identify the weakness in your personal security and help in understanding the larger patterns within the violence ecosystem online. The items that you may want to look out for are date, time, what happened, whom it appears to be from, where is this happening and any other details about the incident
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