Overview on Doxing
Doxing is the act of finding, obtaining, and publicizing the personal information of another person, such as their real name, address, and other information that can be used to harass them. As internet users, we should be aware of how these kinds of attacks are carried out by bad actors.
When it comes to online harassment, doxing someone is one of the most powerful tools at a harasser’s disposal. It’s a potent tool when used to find personal information of a victim, like knowing someone’s family, friends, or place of employment. For example, a harasser could find out where an activist’s family lives and harass them in person.
The bad actors use freely available resources and in some cases, they use premium services offered by various websites online .ie. Premium background information checking. In this guide, we will be exploring some of the most readily available ways and tools that bad actors may use on the internet to find information about an individual. Some of the common ways the bad actors have abused the available information include;
- Creating virtual bank accounts to carry out fraudulent transactions.
- Creating fake social media accounts.
- Creating legitimate looking, fake profiles on dating apps.
- Applying for soft bank loans.
- Harassing the victims.
- Using the information to perform other kinds of fraudulent activities online.
In this doxing guide, we will be covering both the premium and the readily available services (One of the major advantages of using a paid service over a free service for doxing is that it has more accurate and detailed information. Resources are used to ensure the accuracy of the information required while the free services have a lot of information but the information may be untrue).
List of paid doxing tools
1. truthfinder.com
Truthfinder is one of the major sources of a person’s information. Using truth finder, you can search for a specific profile having the names of the person, the city where he/she lives, and the specific state. There are many other filter features on truthfinder to use while doxing. Truthfinder can also be used to find a person’s information using the reverse phone lookup option.
Truthfinder comes with a free and a premium service where the free service restricts users to only be able to view just some information relating to a profile they are doxing while the paid option offers access to more information related to a certain person.
2. instantcheckmate.com
Instantcheckmate is another website similar to truthfinder.com but they both have some differences too. While doxing using instant checkmate, we are able to access information from different sources i.e. Reverse phone lookup, social media profiles, death records, criminal records, and many other publicly available information.
Instantcheckmate requires a user to have an account with them before using the services they provide. You may also be required to pay some dollars to be able to access premium services while doxing. Different search filters are available for use on instantcheckmate.
3. pipl
Pipl is a bit different compared to these other two sources of information. Pipl is mainly used by business owners and employees to detect fake profiles and for profile enrichment. It can also be used by an individual who wants to find information regarding a specific profile which in other words is doxing. Unlike other profile information sources, while using pipl in doxing, you can be able to find information about a profile by searching using usernames, emails phone numbers, and even the location.
Pipl will scour the internet to find accounts from other major websites, especially social media, and return them. This serves as a good starting point while doxing. Pipl will tell us where to look next. Pipl however requires you to have an account with them before you start using any of their services.
List of opensource doxing tools
As we have seen, in the above tools, we require a paid package on most of the websites. There are also open source tools that we can use for doxing. These tools are free to use and have capabilities almost similar to the paid tools with some of them checking for a profile across more than 300 popular websites. Some of the tools can also be able to extract profile information automatically when found during a search.
1. Sherlock
Being an opensource tool, sherlock can be used for doxing. Sherlock helps information security specialists to find a specific username across 300 popular websites. Sherlock automates the process of manually checking for a username. For doxing, you can download sherlock from its official GitHub repository. To install and start using sherlock for doxing, we can clone its GitHub repository using the command.
git clone https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock.git
We then navigate to the sherlock directory.
cd sherlock
and we install the required packages for sherlock to run.
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
After installation is over, we can start searching for a username of interest by running the command.
python3 sherlock username
After running the command, you can sit back and wait for sherlock to do the doxing. Sherlock will return the links to social media accounts where an account with a similar username has been found for further action.
2. Maigret
Maigret is a fork of sherlock but has advanced features for automated doxing. Only the username is required while using maigret. Maigret will collect information found on the web pages where the username is found. More so, maigret does not require API keys for doxing. It also has a large database of around 2,500 websites and checks the username against 500 websites by default.
To run maigret for doxing, the steps are similar to those of running sherlock since maigret is its fork.
We clone maigret from its GitHub repository.
git clone https://github.com/soxoj/maigret
We then navigate into the directory
cd maigret
Next, we install the required packages
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
Finally, we run maigret.
python3 maigret.py username
Conclusion
Doxing is an important skill for forensic experts looking to solve complex cases involving internet related fraud. In the past years, doxing has been used to solve complex cases which were hard to crack for law enforcement agencies. Using these techniques, bad actors are also able to collect useful information before employing social engineering attacks on their targets. Social media users should be cautious not to share personal information on social media websites. This is to ensure that they will not fall victim to doxing.
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