Incident mapping a dox

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Doxxing is the intentional exposure of someone's personal information, like a home address, phone number or family details, with the aim of silencing or intimidating them — or your entire organization by proxy. It's designed to make one person feel isolated, exposed and out of control. A good response does the opposite.

Most people learn they've been doxxed after folks have already been digging for a while, usually because threats, impersonation accounts or strange messages show up. You'll rarely know when it started, so don't build your response around that. Start from what you know now — and when you know it.

Responding well comes down to information and choice. The person being targeted should know what's been exposed, what their options are and what each option costs, so they can decide what happens next.

Decisions about their information, their accounts and whether to say anything publicly are theirs, with the organization's backing. The organization's job is to carry the work: monitoring, documentation, removals, comms and the calls for outside help.

We built four one-page tools to help organizations do that. They're free and openly licensed, so print them, share them and adapt them for your team, just credit Brightlines.

You are here. Where you are in an incident, what tends to come next and what each stage calls for. Download.

When you find out. What needs to happen at the same time, and who owns each piece. The person being targeted owns none of the work and all of the decisions about their own information. Download.

When to look outward. What you're seeing, who to call and what to ask them for. Download.

Who owns what. Six roles across before, during and after an incident. Download.

Download all four as one toolkit. Download.

You can't get everything about a person offline, and you don't need to. The goal is to make them hard enough to find that the people looking give up, and to get them back to making their own choices about their work, their visibility and their lives.

If you want help with any of it, from monitoring to removals to working through an incident with you, reach out to us at Brightlines.