Doxxing Safety Part II: Incident Response

Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse. 

This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodology for you to clean up your digital footprint and get a firm entry into the art of open source intelligence. There's a slight bit of repetition here, but with a slant towards using those now-familiar tools and methods toward what to do in the context of incident response. The best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with this post and its tactics before something happens, then return back to it for reference when needed.

Incident Log

An incident log is a way to keep track of suspicious or harmful activity online. It doesn't need to be beautiful or complex, just a place where you can quickly note details around the different things you're seeing online. Noting times, places, people, and the general nature of what you see ought to be enough. In the event that law enforcement gets involved, this sort of record will be helpful. 

The process of finding and noting hateful incidents online can be incredibly stressful, so now is a good time to revisit the team roles you might have already thought of in the previous blog post. If you haven't yet done that, here's a brief refresher:

Assign Team Roles

Remember, privacy–and responding to doxxing–is a team sport. Knowing who you trust is as important as identifying threat actors. Having trusted people ready to assist is invaluable in this type of situation. Refer them to this blog post or specific recommendations in it. If you've already plotted out a list of designated team roles, now is the time to remind everyone of their responsibilities. That might look like monitoring the hate forums where activity happens, keeping track of events in the incident log, setting up web alerts, locking down your social media accounts, or contacting law enforcement to reduce the likelihood of SWATing (a type of attack where bad actors call the police on their target, hoping to incite violence or disruption of peace by bringing law enforcement to their door).

Monitoring Hate Forums

So often the victims of doxxing and harassment campaigns are positioned that way because of bias or bigotry. If you're a part of a community who is the target of such abuse, you are likely already aware of the places where such bigots gather and the language they use. Safely and privately accessing those sites to check for organizing against you or those in your community is a crucial step to take. Take great care to do so privately. We recommend you use the Tor browser for such information-gathering missions. It’s also advisable that you don’t engage with anyone in those places.

Again, this step can be particularly stressful; asking a friend for help is a good idea, or you can thoughtfully apply some of the advice from the next section to automate the process.

Set Up Search Alerts

Google alerts is a free service that Google offers to alert you when a particular keyword—like your name—is freshly indexed by their search engine. Doxxing efforts done by anonymous trolls may not trigger an alert, but if you're the target of smear campaigns in the media, or the victim of abuse by very prominent media figures, those things are more likely to appear. Updates can come pretty frequently, so we advise leaving the monitoring of these alerts to a person that you trust.

For a more sophisticated approach, you could use a tool like Open Measures to automate the task of tracking coordinated campaigns. It's important to note that this type of tool is more likely to miss nuanced language or oblique references to you and your community.

Hardening Your Public Facing Accounts

For accounts that you can't or don't want to shut down, at the very least you must review the privacy and security