Doxing

About

Doxing, sometimes spelled as Doxxing, is the practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personal information, such as home address, work information and credit card numbers, without their consent. The word is derived from “docs,” which is a shortened term for “documents.”

Origin

The term “dox” was first used as a shorthand for “documents” by computer hackers and crackers involved with pirated software^[8] distribution, in describe new updates, cracks or patches. By 2008, the term had been defined as personal information leaked by a third-party on Urban Dictionary.^[9]

Precursors

The act of publicly disclosing another Internet user’s personal information dates back to the 1990s on Usenet, where it became a common practice to post another poster’s personal information (or PI) during arguments and flame wars.^[3] In 1994, scandalous stories about legendary Usenet posters were shared in a four-part compilation via newsgroup alt.folklore.computers,^[4] however, these stories were largely limited to details about sockpuppet accounts and user profile information to expose their online activities outside of Usenet. This trolling tactic eventually came to a head in 1999, when owner of rec.skiing.alpine Scott Abraham^[5] was banned from the newsgroup by a Seattle court order after he had been found guilty of participating in a flame war^[6] and sharing personal information about other posters.

Spread

In October 2006, the group YouTube Vigilantes^[13] was established to seek out personal information of YouTubers deemed hateful or racist in vlog format.^[14] The head of the group, CircaRigel^[16], had all of her personal information leaked online by members of Encyclopedia Dramatica in January 2007 on the security issue newsgroup Full Disclosure^[15], not only including her name and address, but personal posts she had made to the newsgroup alt.sexual.abuse.recovery. “Dox” was added to Wikitionary^[1] in 2011, the same year that Doxbin^[10] launched, a TOR site that hosts dozens of files containing personal information on specific people as well as groups of people. As of October 2012, there are more than 34,100 results for “dox” on Pastebin.^[17]

Notable Instances

January 2007: Hal Turner

One of the first archived doxing campaigns targeted American white nationalist and blogger Hal Turner, who waged a war against Anonymous by disclosing the phone numbers of prank callers that had raided his radio talk show on-air in December 2006. In retaliation, a group of Anonymous members known as Chan Enterprises LLC launched a doxing investigation and managed to obtain Turner’s criminal record, housing details, former locations of residence and detailed personal information such as his home phone number. As a result of the feud, Turner filed lawsuits against 4chan, eBaums World and 7chan in January 2007, although all of the cases had been dismissed by December 2007.

October 2007: Chris Forcand

As early as in October 2007, members of Anonymous approached Chris Forcand, a suspected pedophile, under the pretense of being underage girls to collect evidence of him luring children in chatrooms. During one of these conversations, an Anonymous participant named “Jessica” was able to obtain Forcand’s mailing address, which soon led to uncovering of additional personal information about him. In December 2007, Forcand was arrested by the police after the information was passed on by anonymous tipsters.

May 2008: Linden Lab Staff

In May 2008, members of a group named DiSSENTiON posted a YouTube video (shown below) stating their plan to attack Second Life users and release information on Linden Lab staff members in retaliation for treating users poorly.^[11] Members of the SLUniverse forum discussed the attack, where one of the users received a message stating “you fail at releasing dox” after attempting to leak information on someone’s fake name.