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Feels odd for an infosec blog to use 'doxxing' this way. Doxxing is generally considered to be unethical exposure of personal information. Identifying a crimin
by nailer 7mo ago
Feels odd for an infosec blog to use 'doxxing' this way. Doxxing is generally considered to be unethical exposure of personal information.
Identifying a criminal is ethical.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago>Identifying a criminal is ethical. This outsourcing of one's morals to the state is excessive even by already high western white collar internet standards. Now, make no mistake, these guys are up to no good and probably should be identified and prosecuted, but to just declare that a bad thing is now good because government is doing it is basically an abdication of one's moral compass. At best this is still a bad thing but a necessary one because all the other options are worse. Like shooting someone in self defense, or putting someone in a cage for doing sufficiently bad things. Edit: I'll admit I played too loose with ethics vs morality here, but still the point stands.
- dmos62 7mo agoInnocent until proven guilty (in a court of law)?
- wat10000 7mo ago"Identifying a criminal" doesn't imply that it's done by the government, and being done by the government doesn't imply that it's done to a criminal. This comment seems like quite a leap.
- jstanley 7mo agoIt's the government who defines what "criminal" means.
- wat10000 7mo agoNot necessarily. I'm free to make my own determination on the matter.
- zaphar 7mo agoYou are certainly free to make up your own definitions for words and speak a dialect that is niche but you will not be effectively communicating when you do. By commonly understood definition criminality is a matter of law.
- wat10000 7mo agoWell, the dude here hasn't been put on trial, let alone convicted, as far as I can tell from the article. So he's not officially considered a criminal by a government. Yet we all seem comfortable calling him one, so I'd say that it is not, in fact, commonly understood to be exclusively a matter of law.
- wswin 7mo agonot the state, but the law
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 7mo agoethics and morality are not interchangeable are they? anyway individuals willingly give to teh state some autonomy in return for the safety of governance... that's the social contract free people have with government "doxxing" a Russian ransomware group is the kind thing to do. bombing them out of existence is within the remit of the range of ideas a government could resort to...
- mc32 7mo agoNot disagreeing with your preface but I was under the impression that while it took governments some time to figure things out, kinetic bombing in retaliation for cyberwarfare was pretty much ruled out unless the cyberwarfare results in direct mass casualties (for example cyber sabotaging a refinery results in an explosion which results in casualties.). Else we’d have bombed North Korea, China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, etc.
- gigatexal 7mo agoYeah bombing as a counter to cyber attacks is a last ditch Pandora’s box thing
- Yokohiii 7mo agoCertainly, criminals also have a right to privacy. However, the limited publication of personal data of criminals by law enforcement is generally a legally legitimate measure. Doxxing, on the other hand, is generally a process that violates the fundamental right to privacy.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago>criminals >law >legally You keep using these words but it causes circular logic as those are all defined by the same entity that is acting unilaterally. The action the government took was not a "good" action by any moral standard. But it was perhaps the least worse action available all things considered. Can't just whisk people off the street in a foreign country or drone them over such matters, those options would be worse.
- zaphar 7mo agoIs it your position that privacy is a right regardless of any action you take? Many rights are dependent on circumstance and in tension with other rights. In this case I think you can make the case that their right to privacy is lost.
- oytis 7mo agoRunning a ransomware gang is immoral. Catching someone running a ransomware gang is good. If publishing their name helps catch them, it's also good. Not sure where do you see the gap between legality and morality in this case
- flipped 7mo agoPeople often forget that Threat Actors (TA) are the ones keeping the infosec alive. They are doing a good job of scaring people into implementing actual security protocols and thereby improving everyone's security posture. The whole infosec would collapse without TAs, let's not forget that. They create jobs.
- 7mo ago
- moffkalast 7mo agoI think they obviously just took it as 'exposure of personal information' period.
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- layer8 7mo ago> Identifying a criminal is ethical. I agree that “doxxing” is being misused in TFA, but criminals have privacy rights like anyone else. Violating these rights requires specific justification, it’s not automatically ethical.
- KingOfCoders 7mo agoThey put the person on a wanted list.
- layer8 7mo agoMy comment isn’t about this specific case. It’s about the general claim.
- pixl97 7mo agoI mean doxxing is totally incorrect. Let's say for example there was a person on film near a crime scene, even though the police know they weren't directly involved there is no violation of privacy in the US if the police post their picture and ask for them to come forward. Or even later find out their name and look for them publically.
- KPGv2 7mo ago"Doxxing" is from the 90s and was used to describe a hacker unmasking another hacker so they could be arrested. That's almost exactly the same usage as here.
- Sharlin 7mo agoSemantic shift happens over time. A 2026 article is supposed to communicate to 2026, not 1996, readers.
- randomNumber7 7mo agoGermany is a bit backwards.
- perlgeek 7mo agoWut? The headline is from Krebs on Security, not from the German authorities.
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- nailer 7mo agoI can't find it in the jargon file: http://catb.org/jargon/html/D.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/D.html
- stackghost 7mo agoIt comes from leetspeak. Identity documents -> docs -> dox
- mghackerlady 7mo ago(someone really needs to make a new jargon file, if not out of practicality then for archival reasons)
- anonym29 7mo agoDepends on who's laws you're following. Is it ethical to dox a pregnant woman seeking an abortion in a southern US state? Is it ethical to dox a gay human rights defender in Russia? Is it ethical to dox a woman seeking an education in Afghanistan? Not all criminals have done something wrong.