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.

Reddit exif data viewer program