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The Rise of Political Doxing (schneier.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Security guru Bruce Schneier predicts a new trend in hacking: political doxing. He points to the recent hack of CIA director Jack Brennan's personal email account and notes that it marks a shift in the purpose of email hacking: "Here, the attacker had a more political motive. He wasn't out to intimidate Brennan; he simply wanted to embarrass him. His personal papers were dumped indiscriminately, fodder for an eager press." Schneier continues, "As people realize what an effective attack this can be, and how an individual can use the tactic to do considerable damage to powerful people and institutions, we're going to see a lot more of it. ... In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful."
I guess this is why Bruce Schneier is a guru and gets the big bucks....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
There's a simple counter-measure - don't be ashamed of anything you do. Kind of hard to exert pressure on someone by revealing their personal stuff if they don't give a sh*t.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful.
...Or keep the powerless in their place.
We have secrets and embarrassing things on Facebook and other places online that will never go away and can be found if you look hard enough. Most of us don't have the luxury of being groomed from birth to be politicians and avoid these pitfalls.
Going through Sarah Palin's emails (either the official ones the judge ordered released and the New York Times attempted to crowdsource finding embarassing stuff OR the ones that the 4chan hacker whose father was an elected Democrat released) was an attempted doxxing.
What Bradley Manning did was a doxxing. Hell, so was the release of the Pentagon Papers.
Jumping even further back, the XYZ Affair was revealed by a doxxer leaking details to the (partisan) press.
Releasing your opponent's embarrassing documents has probably been going on for as long as we've had written language.
Exactly. How long will it be before such people start to just vanish into some black hole somewhere. If that doesn't work then their family, friends, etc will likewise suffer. This is always the last resort of the more powerful to the weaker. That's what being weaker MEANS, you can't protect yourself.
And if the tactic does work? It will just become another tool of the scumbags. Turds always float to the surface.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing". And the inability of top government officials to control even their own, valuable private information is politically highly significant, given how much information the US federal government is increasingly collecting about us: detailed financial and banking information, medical records, detailed census information, and lots more.
JFK doxed Nixon a couple of times back in the 1960 campaign. You can look it up.
The CIA wants to read my email, know what websites I visit, etc. turn about is fair play.
that's such an ignorant comment! Everybody knows that CIA is prohibited from taking action on domestic soil and can only work in foreign countries.
Yes, and Bruce is wrong. The fact that Verizon and AOL have weak security is well known and ought to be obvious to anybody with any kind of knowledge of computer security. If a CIA director stores information that he obviously values on systems that he ought to know can be trivially breached, it calls into question his competence.
It would be. But since these security holes have been well known for many years and have hurt many people, the fact that these providers haven't been held accountable for them in the past shows that the government doesn't give a fuck. If they now crack down on providers because a government official was caught with his pants down, that is simple vindictiveness and arbitrariness.
For high government officials, the release of personal information does compromise security, because it makes them susceptible to identity theft and blackmail. But even if it didn't, evidently he didn't like this information being released, yet he stored it on a system he ought to have known was woefully insecure.
I sure hope so!
If you believe that "the powerful" won't implement a countermeasure that makes us all regret the doxing, you're a moron.
I already regret it. This doxing is just one more reason for good people to avoid public office. There are reasons that many of our leaders are narcissistic sociopaths, and by driving away good people, this is just making it worse.