Doxbin is a defunct

onion service Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to con ...

. It was a type of

pastebin A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippet (programming), snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous ...

primarily used by people posting

personal data Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted in the United States, but the phrase it abbreviates ha ...

(often referred to as ''doxing'') of any person of interest. Due to the illegal nature of much of the information it published (such as

social security numbers In the United States, a Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary (working) residents under section 205(c)(2) of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to ...

, bank routing information, and credit card information, all in

plain-text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only character (computing), characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (Floating point numbers, floating-point numb ...

), it was one of many sites seized during ''

Operation Onymous Operation Onymous was an international law enforcement operation targeting darknet markets and other hidden services operating on the Tor network. Background Operation Onymous was formed as a joint law enforcement operation between the Federa ...

'', a multinational police initiative, in November 2014.

History

Doxbin was established to act as a secure,

anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...

venue for the publication of dox, first established by an individual known as nachash. Dox being a term in

Internet culture Internet culture is a culture based on the many way people have used computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Some features of Internet culture include online communities, gaming, and social media ...

which refers to personally identifiable information about individuals, including

social security number In the United States, a Social Security number (SSN) is a nine-digit number issued to U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and temporary (working) residents under section 205(c)(2) of the Social Security Act, codified as . The number is issued to ...

street address An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used to give the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using political boundaries and street names as references, along ...

es,

username A user is a person who utilizes a computer or Computer network, network Service (systems architecture), service. A user often has a user account and is identified to the system by a username (or user name). Other terms for username includ ...

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

s, and

password A password, sometimes called a passcode (for example in Apple devices), is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of ...

s, obtained through a variety of legal and illegal means. In November 2012, Doxbin's

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

handle @Doxbin was attributed to an attack on

Symantec Symantec may refer to: *An American consumer software company now known as Gen Digital Inc. *A brand of enterprise security software purchased by Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier ...

, coordinated with

Anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...

' ''Operation Vendetta''. It first attracted attention in March 2014 when its then-owner hijacked a popular

Tor hidden service Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

The Hidden Wiki The Hidden Wiki was a dark web MediaWiki wiki operating as Tor hidden services that could be anonymously edited after registering on the site. The main page served as a directory of links to other .onion sites. History The first Hidden Wik ...

, pointing its visitors to Doxbin instead as a response to the maintenance of pages dedicated to

child pornography Child pornography (also called CP, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, child porn, or kiddie porn) is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a chi ...

links. In June 2014, their

account was suspended, prompting the site to start listing the personal information of the Twitter founders and CEO. In October 2014, Doxbin hosted personal information about Katherine Forrest, a

federal judge Federal judges are judges appointed by a federal level of government as opposed to the state/provincial/local level. United States A US federal judge is appointed by the US President and confirmed by the US Senate in accordance with Article 3 of ...

responsible for court rulings against the owner of

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

-based

black market A black market, underground economy, or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by noncompliance with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the se ...

Silk Road The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and reli ...

, leading to

death threat A death threat is a threat, often made anonymously, by one person or a group of people to kill another person or group of people. These threats are often designed to intimidate victims in order to manipulate their behaviour, in which case a deat ...

s and

harassment Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates or embarrasses a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and moral ...

. Doxbin and several other hidden services were seized in November 2014 as part of the multinational police initiative ''Operation Onymous''. 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 In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...

(DDoS) or exploited mistakes in its

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

code. However, the site could still be restored easily by setting up a new domain.

References

{{Tor hidden services Defunct Tor hidden services Internet privacy Internet properties disestablished in 2014 Internet services shut down by a legal challenge Harassment

History

See also

References