Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do I Recover From Doxxing?
An anonymous reader writes: I've been doxxed on a popular forum, by one of the moderators no less. The forum owner doesn't care, the hosting company doesn't care. I'm getting bombarded by email and social media, even via GitHub. How does a person recover from this? I don't want to create a whole new identity or shut down all my web sites, social media etc. Can't really change my real name either, at least not without an incredible amount of hassle. The police don't care, and since the forum owner is on the other side of the world it's unlikely there could be any legal consequences, and even if they were they would probably only draw more attention to me. I've tried to clean up Google's search results about me. How do I fix this? What does a fix even look like?
If you go to a user page on GitHub, you can report abuse and/or block users.
Even if they are using an alt account, reporting abuse is a good first step because if they create more alts, GitHub may eventually block those, and even the main account if they have one.
On email, mark the sender as spam, for the phone if you can just disable voice mail for a while and whitelist calls.
It's probably just a handful of idiots so if you ignore them and carry on eventually they will tire of getting nothing out of their efforts.
If the moderators of a forum are against you not much you can do except carry on and complain to the web site owners. But do be really sure about what you are complaining about and present evidence of what you are claiming they did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
More often than not, 'doxxing' is just compiling information that is already available on the internet. People think they've been 'hacked' or 'stalked' but they often forget that they posted the information in some forum/comment section using the same username they use everywhere. I once had a guy ask me to do it to him because he didn't believe that I could. He'd posted 6 times on the forum in question using that username. I was able to identify 2 or 3 other anonymous accounts he'd used on that forum, pictures of not only the exterior but the interior of his house, his real name/social media profile and all the troves of information that provides. It took me about an hour to tease out his data from a woman in Florida. Why? Because he'd mentioned his cats names in one of those 6 posts. That lady in Florida had the same names for her cats, otherwise it was the only thread I needed to pull to unravel exactly who this guy was.
Questioner here. By publishing my details on this forum they have started off a campaign of harassment. I also have to keep checking Google and bing to make sure I'm not going to be screwed next time I apply for a job, and that it won't stop people contributing to my open source projects.
The worst part is that although I'm not the one doing it, at a casual glance it makes me look childish. Like some 4channer who pissed off other 4channers.
You can't become someone new in real life, but you can become a new person on the Internet, someone nobody cares about anymore. There are probably millions of doxx out there, and nobody has time to SWAT all of them. If your old identity disappears, people will stop caring.
Change your email, create new logins for your forum and social media sites and give the new identity only to people you absolutely trust. And stop going to the forum that doxxed you (or if you insist on being a moron, create a new login).
Two comments: first, this only works if people are interested in you because of who you are on the Internet. If you're somebody in real life, you're screwed, but you can probably get the cops to care. Second, yes, this is totally letting the doxxers win. But once your info's out there, it's not about being right on the Internet, it's about keeping your house from burning down.
Serious question. Why?
I always use my real full name. My slashdot account is an exception now (it was my email address back in '97) but my email is real. I don't see the benefit of total anonymity--as a free software developer both as a hobbyist and professional programmer, I don't want to participate in development behind some random handle, I want people to know who they are interacting with both in real life and via email/usenet/forums/bugtrackers/whatever. And vice versa Hiding behind anonymous handles is the exception rather than the rule, and while there are sometimes reasons for it, it's unusual. For whatever subconcious reason, I also tend to prefer to know who I'm dealing with--I'd be more likely to ignore or postpone dealing with a bug report from an anonymous person, for example. For some random unimportant forum it might not matter, but when you're participating in development with others over an extended period (years to decades) it would be a bit weird to be anonymous. While I think "doxxing" sounds like childish bullying, I don't see that hiding my name would help much should someone single me out. If they cared enough, they'd find out anyway.
That said, while my name and email addresses are not kept secret, I do value the privacy of my actual personal details etc., and I wouldn't be amused if they were published, but as mentioned in this discussion, stuff like phone numbers and addresses are "public" if you know where to look. Mine is in the paper phone book and you can look it up online. While it would be nice if idiots didn't abuse this, it's not realistic to keep secret stuff we need to communicate with each other. If you do a google image search for my name, three of the first two rows of images are me; two take you to my work profile page and my work contact details (email, phone, address), the other is my github profile. It would probably only take a few more minutes to work out my home address as well for a determined person. Occasionally I do get people contacting my via all these work details for legitimate purposes. While it would be nice to not have idiots abusing these things, we equally can't wall ourselves off from the world in an isolated bubble.
Regards,
Roger
Yup. I may have G+ profiles under my real name and the name I go under when dealing with internet-stuff. My domains point to PO boxes. Good luck mailing shit to a PO box.
Doxx'ers get their stuff from public Whois first, Phonebooks second, legal records third, and insiders of Verizon/AT&T or other Utility companies. Sometimes even having a cop or someone who works at the DMV in the state is leaking the information.
It's very hard to figure out who leaks your information, thus every time you change physical address, you should change utility providers (gas, internet, electricity, phone, tv/cable) until you figure out which one leaked the information. Unfortunately it's usually the phone companies that do this. Good god, when I first got a landline out here in the city, I was getting a dozen calls per day of telemarketers, that I just stopped answering the phone. My Mobile phone, other than the random "obviously fake same NPA-NXX" calls, I get no calls whatsoever. When I briefly subscribed to the Cable Company's digital phone line... I got no phone calls whatsoever than one day I got a call... from the Phone company trying to sell me on switching to them. What does that tell me? The Cable Company sold a list, or is abusing their LNP database.
So... to the OP...
Your best bet if you really want to get away from this crap is to change your physical name (costs about 300$ here and a lot of document replacement costs thereafter) , physically move, even if it's to another unit in the same building (but better if you move to a different city altogether,) change your mailing addresses on everything to a PO box, if you have a job, get a new one under the new name. Delete your facebook/twitter/linkedin/etc profiles and stay off those sites going forward.
I've actually done all of this after I had a falling out with an insane roommate who is one of those 4-chan types. I needed to disappear just enough that I couldn't be found in Google, but anyone who followed the bread crumbs long enough would only come to old contact information. My cell phone number changed as a result of moving to a different area code, so that wasn't even a possibility for stalkers to find me.
But end result is that I've generally not had to worry about assholes doxx'ing me. At worst, I've had assholes that I sent DMCA requests to attempt to destroy the email address sent from with mailbait + botnet, but jokes on them, that email address is only used to SEND DMCA requests.