How to dox yourself

It’s Data Privacy Week, making it the perfect time to dig deep into data—your data.

Cyber criminals often scour the web for data and other personal identifiable information (PII), which they can use against you to implement phishing attacks, phone scams, account takeovers, and more. One way to prevent this? Google yourself. Better yet—just dox yourself.

Why? Lisa Plaggemier, executive director of the National Cybersecurity Alliance, boils it down to awareness and prevention. “You’re kind of putting yourself in the shoes of the bad guy and trying to figure out—if I were trying to do something malicious, what would I do? What would I be able to find?” she told IT Brew. “So I think the act of doxing yourself helps to remind you of that reality that bad things happen online, and you have to protect yourself.”

Here are four ways to keep your cyber footprint in check:

1. Sign up for sites that do the heavy lifting for you. Sites like DeleteMe or OneRep charge a fee to sift through data broker sites and search engines to find your personal information. These sites can continuously monitor your data, request removal, and send you a monthly report detailing info they were able to find and remove.
2. Eliminate the trail. Bad actors often try to piece together a person’s close contacts and social circle, and one easy way they can do that is by following your social trail, paying attention to tagged posts, tagged photos, and people you interact with most. “Assume that even though my Facebook friends [list] and my profile is private, somebody found out who I am through somebody else tagging me,” Plaggemier said. 
3. Do regular checkups. Conduct regular privacy and security checkups on your social media accounts—which means using strong passwords, limiting the audience of your social media posts, keeping things updated, setting up MFA, and checking your accounts for suspicious activity, recently added friends, or unknown logins.
4. Find your face. Use a site like PimEyes or conduct a Google reverse image search to see where your image has popped up online. PimEyes doesn’t get it right every time, but we still think it’s worth looking into for cases of revenge porn and identity theft.

CTRL+F. Taking it one step further, Plaggemier recommends checking out your credit history online and also conducting a background check. “Criminals are lazy; they will move on to another victim if it is too difficult to take advantage of you. If you make it hard, if you make your profile private, that puts a speed bump in the road of the cybercriminal who’s trying to dox you,” she said.