Doxers Posing as Cops Are Tricking Big Tech Firms Into Sharing People's Private Data

When a privacy specialist at the legal response operations center of Charter Communications received an emergency data request via email on September 4 from Officer Jason Corse of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, it took her just minutes to respond, with the name, home address, phone numbers, and email address of the “target.”

But the email had not in fact come from Corse or anyone else at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. It was sent by a member of a hacking group that provides doxing-as-a-service to customers willing to pay for highly sensitive personal data held by tech companies in the United States.

“This took all of 20 minutes,” Exempt, a member of the group that carried out the ploy, told WIRED. He claims that his group has been successful in extracting similar information from virtually every major US tech company, including Apple and Amazon, as well as more fringe ...