Even worse, his employers were contacted by doxxers demanding Mr. Quinn found his image being shared by thousands of people across social media and he was bombarded by messages on Twitter and Instagram. Kyle Quinn, a professor from Arkansas, was wrongly accused of participating in the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. While the cause might seem worthy, doxxing is and remains online vigilantism and this is never good. In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of cases of Neonazi forum users being doxxed, harassed online and even getting fired because of their opinions, as reported in this New York Times piece. In the pursuit of trying to silence dangerous agendas, the number of online vigilantes has risen alarmingly. With the current political landscape being what it is, a large number of people are fighting against Nazi and Neonazi organizations rising to attention both online and offline. But public shaming and vigilantism are not the way to go. Of course, what Michael Brutsch was doing was illegal and the authorities should have gotten involved to discover who he is and punish him according to the law. But his life as a notorious Reddit troll is just one search away. After this episode, there is little information to go around as to what happened next to Michael Brutsch.
Not only that, but he also hosted a podcast, which Chen used in a phone call with Michael Brutsch to see if the voices matched.Īfter he was doxxed, Brutsch ended up losing his job and enduring a very public shaming, which was made even worse by his decision to do a CNN interview. In photoshoots, he asked for his face to be blurred. For one, he actually met Reddit users in real life, in meetups and parties. In other words, Michael Brutsch was doxxed.Ĭhen was able to do the doxxing because Michael Brutsch took risks with his identity. For instance, he created subreddits (subforums) around misogyny or sexualized photos of underage women.įor a long while, Michael Brutsch succeeded in keeping his online identity, violentacrez, a secret.īut Gawker journalist Adrian Chen managed to connect Michael Brutsch to violentacrez, and then went public with the information. Over the years, he created a reputation as a troll because of his posts on the website.
Michael Brutsch created an online persona named violentacrez for the Internet messaging board Reddit. This is called doxxing, and has messed up the lives of more than one person. Nowadays, doxxing is used to shame or punish people who would rather stay anonymous, because of their controversial beliefs or other types of non-mainstream activity.īecause most of us are careless with the information we share on the Internet, we tend to leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs a cybercriminal can use to find out our real identity, then deploy a string of malicious attacks.
The term “doxxing” comes from the expression “ dropping dox”, which was a revenge tactic used by hackers where they dropped malicious information on a rival. Doxxing is analyzing information posted online by the victim in order to identify and later harass that person. The attacker then reveals that person’s details so others can target them with malicious attacks. Doxxing is a type of cyber attack that involves discovering the real identity of an Internet user.
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