Cyberbullying, The Boxxy Story, An Inside Look at an Internet Witchhunt

If you want an inside view of how easy it is for skilled internet users with a vendetta to uncover someone's personal information from old accounts and other tidbits of what we post online, this blog about the boxxy 4chan incident is particularly illustrative, albeit it contains a lot of conjecture. In particular, the author of the blog described the incident as revealing "some rather brutal realities of current internet culture, with lessons for all of us. "

http://boxxystory.blogspot.com/2009/01/fall-of-boxxy.html

The incident concerns a Youtube user boxxybabee who's viral video divided the 4chan community between those who heralded her as the "Queen of /b/" and those who sought to shut her down. A splinter group known as the Center for Boxxy Control and Restriction (CBCR) pieced together her identity from her discarded accounts on a variety of sites culminating in the hacking of her Youtube account. The following excerpts from the blog post should give a good idea of what happened:

Boxxy’s downfall was in the failure to effectively cover up the trail of accounts she has used over the years. The discovery of a much earlier Youtube account was the breakthrough.

From the information on the old Youtube, a Myspace account was found. The current version of the account seems to be wiped clean, with the username changed to keyboard gibberish. However, Boxxy was caught out again, this time by the Google cache which stored the page as it appeared in November 2008, as well as the first page of photos.

These pages also suggest, with a high certainty, that Boxxy - for two solid weeks the target of constant sexually orientated comments, death threats and general aggressive unpleasantries posted all over 4chan and Youtube, is not the variously quoted 22, 21 or 18, but only 16 years old.

However the final knockout blow was not in these cached Myspace pages, but another website (I will not be specific) which allowed those tracking her to find her full name, from which the hackers presumably deduced her email address.

Whilst these snippets of info were filtering through to /b/, some strange activity was seen. A thread appeared, with Boxxy’s full name, and a previously unseen, high resolution photo, followed quickly by another... Instructions were given to ‘ruin her life’."

It sounded semi-plausible, but, unbeknownst to the vast majority of /b/ at that moment, the CBRC had long since uncovered a photobucket account which was later seen to contain the same photos, so the implication is obvious, members of the CBRC were trolling /b/ with the photos in a attempt to throw them off, as they themselves were close to breaking into her accounts and did not want Anonymous to do it first.

Within a couple of hours, CBRC had breached her Youtube account, via successfully guessing the secret answer for her email account, deduced from the stack of information they uncovered. Or phishing her with a fake email, depending on who you listen to. They then made her videos private, uploading a video warning her to never post another video again. This attracted 1000 comments within an hour and became the most commented video of the day on Youtube. So that brought it to an end, in theory. They had removed the ‘cancer’.

Rapidly, the comments for their video began to fill with alleged lists of the IP’s of CBRC members... Vengeance is promised. (Tip: nothing will happen.) For some reason, the hackers videos were then removed, with the original videos restored. On January 20th, the boxxybabee account was suspended.

I read this article a few years ago. What it impressed upon me was firstly how easily determined people can find your private information from the little tidbits an discarded accounts we all leave around the internet. It also impressed upon me the sorry state of internet culture in some instances. Here a have a full blown witchhunt, executed primarily for the "lols" and the entertainment of an anonymous community, at the expense of a innocent internet user. These incidents are becoming increasingly common, as can be seen in both the case of Megan Meier and the case of Amanda Todd I posted in a previous post. I think we have to really consider the implications of anonymity, false sense of privacy and what we put on the internet, and the power of the mob/crowd. These incidents are a special case of a more general characteristic of the internet, in that the internet can easily facilitate mass community operations, whether they be witchhunts, open source projects and user made content, or organizing a political revolution.

I will admit, that this article did not change how I used the internet. It's just so easy to internalize a false sense of control over your content and personal information. It reminds me of a chat I had when Omegle first started. The guy I chatted was trying to guess my age, sex, and location (without asking "asl?") from just my speech patterns, which I thought was an interesting exercise. I think he guessed 17, USA, girl for me, which other than the girl part, was fairly accurate. At least my memory was being impressed by his reasoning. The point being that even when you don't think about it, any internet interaction you have that is archived contains clues as to who you are. Though I suppose that with the recent trend towards real identities on social networking platforms, this might just be a m00t point.

PS. After a few years, boxxybabee has since come back to Youtube and embraced her internet persona, posting new videos fairly frequently.

UPDATE: For a more innocuous 4chan hack, here's an article about 4chan "hacking" the 2009 Time.com 100 poll of most influential people. The not only got their founder "m00t" to first place, the first letter of the 21 most influential people spell "marblecake also the game". Another reason to never trust internet polls.

http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/