Fifteen Minutes of Unwanted Fame: Detecting and Characterizing Doxing

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Peter Snyder, Periwinkle Doerfler, Chris Kanich and Damon McCoy.

Doxing is online abuse where a malicious party attempts to harm another by releasing identifying or sensitive information. Motivations for doxing include personal, competitive, and political reasons, and web users of all ages, genders and internet experience have been targeted. Existing research on doxing is primarily qualitative. This work improves our understanding of doxing by being the first to take a quantitative approach. We do so by designing and deploying a tool which can detect dox files and measure the frequency, content, targets, and effects of doxing occurring on popular dox-posting sites.