Doxbin

Doxbin is a document sharing and publishing website which invites users to contribute personally identifiable information, or "dox", of any person of interest. It operates on the dark internet as a Tor hidden service. Due to the illegal nature of much of the information it publishes, it was one of many sites seized during Operation Onymous, a multinational police initiative, in November 2014. It was restored under different ownership in the same month.

History

Doxbin was established to act as a secure, anonymous venue for the publication of dox, a term in Internet culture which refers to personally identifiable information about individuals, including social security numbers, street addresses, usernames, and passwords, obtained through a variety of legal and illegal means.[1][2]

It first attracted attention in March 2014 when its then-owner hijacked a popular Tor hidden service, The Hidden Wiki, pointing its visitors to Doxbin instead as a response to the maintenance of pages dedicated to child pornography links.[3][4][5] In October 2014 Doxbin hosted personal information about Katherine Forrest, a federal judge responsible for court rulings against the owner of Tor-based black market Silk Road, leading to death threats and harassment.[1][2][6][7]

Doxbin and several other hidden services were seized in November 2014 as part of the multinational police initiative Operation Onymous.[8][9][10] Shortly thereafter, one of the site's operators who avoided arrest shared the site's logs and information about how it was compromised with the Tor developers email list, suggesting it could have either been the result of a specialized distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) or exploited mistakes in its PHP code.[8][9][11][12] The site was then transferred to new owners who reclaimed it from authorities and restored it just a week after it went down.[1][2]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Caraluzzo, Carlo (14 November 2014). "Darknet Hackers Retake Control of Seized Doxbin from FBI". Coin Telegraph. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Howell O'Neill, Patrick (10 November 2014). "Dark Net hackers steal seized site back from the FBI". Daily Dot. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  3. ↑ Howell O'Neill, Patrick. "Deep Web hub hacked and shut down over child porn links". Daily Dot.
  4. ↑ Mead, Derek (13 March 2014). "A Hacker Scrubbed Child-Porn Links from the Dark Web's Most Popular Site". Vice.
  5. ↑ "Twitter Founders' Personal Information Released on Doxbin". Darkweb News. 12 June 2014.
  6. ↑ Komando, Kim. "Cybercriminals terrorize federal judge. Now they've done something really scary". KimKomando.com.
  7. ↑ "Site Doxx’es Judge of Silk Road Case – Calls To "Swat" Her". Deepdotweb. 13 October 2014.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Rauhauser, Neal (11 November 2014). "Doxbin’s Nachash On Operation Onymous (P.1)". Deepdotweb. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Gallagher, Sean (9 November 2014). "Silk Road, other Tor "darknet" sites may have been "decloaked" through DDoS". Ars Technica.
  10. ↑ O'Neill, Patrick Howell (17 November 2014). "Tor eyes crowdfunding campaign to upgrade its hidden services". Daily Dot. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  11. ↑ Muadh, Zubair (12 November 2014). "Doxbin’s Nachash On Operation Onymous (P.2)". Deepdotweb. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  12. ↑ nachash [handle]. "[tor-dev] yes hello, internet supervillain here". [tor-dev] mailing list archive.