Uncovering trolls/cyber bullies

[WaterRide]

I was wondering what online tool we do use to investigate trollers/cyber bullies?  I know the police/NCA have stuff at their disposal, but where a friend or colleague suffers from it they often come to us for assistance and I would like to be able to help them out.

[digininja]

It all depends on what is going on, different "attacks" will require different ways to investigate them.

[WaterRide]

I am looking at it from the perspective of someone who has social media accounts and is receiving unwanted messages sent to them directly as well as posted on their wall (i.e. twitter, facebook, instagram).  So a juvenile attack.

[0phoi5]

Most social media sites won't allow you to gather any IP addresses from the 'other side', you'll just end up with the social media platform's IP.

Personally, I'd speak to them, first.

The only other way you'd gather anything would be social engineering or Google-Fu.

[metatron]

Just deactivate your account or ignore it. If its threats towards your life then report it to the police. 

[cooper]

Many social media platforms have a means of reporting someone. Anything you want to do will have to go through them. They might require you to file a police report in case of serious issues. If you want to get information out of them that'll probably require a court order because of privacy issues, but you can ask them to keep this data around (as opposed to delete it along with the account) in preparation of this court order. They'll likely just inform you about their retention policy which basically means that if you really do want to get a lawyer involved, this is the timeframe within which you and your lawyer must now act if you really do want this to go anywhere.

[WaterRide]

Thanks for your tips.  I appreciate it.  I think the best course of action is for the user to report to Police and the Website for them to deal with, as y'all have mentioned.  Thanks

[Rainman_34]

Not to mention taking any action yourself such as going after an IP and attempting to do anything would be illegal.  If you get their IP you really can't do anything anyway.

[vailixi]

Before I get into this to much I'm going to say a few words on ethics. Bullying sometimes serves as a catalyst for positive social change. From an anthropological prospective bullying is a way more primitive people assert their place in the dominance hierarchy. Yes in this day and age it would be nice if people were beyond the need for this but really we aren't. People I think are a little to thin skinned and will report people for just about any arbitrary reason. Not cool if you have a business that depends partially on social media as a marketing platform. That all being said I learned d0xxing when I was an activist. I later applied that to skiptracing gigs and other legitimate investigations.

Open Notepad. Copy and paste everything from their social media profile. Start looking up usernames on sites like Pipl

If you get hits on the usernames look through those profiles and check the personal information to check for matches. For example if the person's age is about 30, profiles will pop up with age of 60 and those aren't good results. Make a logic chart and start narrowing down the results until you have a few suspects. You'll be amazed how many people use the same username or display name for multiple accounts. Sometimes they will have a twitter that will have the same username as the account in question and the twitter account will have their real name. You can look them up on sites like LinkedIn and pretty much know everything about them. You can get grids on their work place.

If you get an email address that is a work email you do a whois search on the domain name. If it comes up with domain privacy don't just stop looking. Try to whois the nameservers sometimes people will pretty stealth with their domain privacy but then the hosting company is one of their buddies and you can just look them up. Sometimes the person will be friends with the webmaster on sites like facebook and you can learn more about them.

So if you've gone the d0xxing route you have some person information on the person. A lot of times you can find information like hometown, mother's maiden name, etc. Sometimes those are used as security questions for password resets and things like that. Keep in mind that illegal hacking could land you in prison. Also if you want to present evidence to an employer or authorities it should be evidence that you came upon legally. Also bare in mind the impact releasing the person's information may have on them professionally or personally and way out whether or not it is a proportional response to what they were doing. In other words don't make your personal mission to wreck someone's because you are butthurt about something somebody said on tinychat, way out the impact.

Also on the record I adore internet sh*@lords. They make me laugh. I don't take kindly when someone PDOSes my machine because I said something that doesn't go along with whatever narrative they are pushing.