A WIRED investigation shows Kofsky is also the person posting as PsychoticMammal. The account has posted personal details that precisely match Kofsky’s résumé, and has linked to a little-followed Instagram account dedicated to photos of Kofsky wearing preppy outfits. A review of publicly available material from data breaches provided by Constella Intelligence shows that Kofsky’s personal email address was used to set up a “PsychoMammal” account on a photography site. Furthermore, the PsychoticMammal name was used on Poshmark by a user whose avatar is a photo of Kofsky. It was also used on Tumblr by someone who linked to—and claimed as his own—a Blogspot maintained by a user named Aaron Kofsky, who posted personal details that match details of Kofsky’s biography.
Apparently, this guy left a huge trail…
Edit: plus data breaches…
It’s always just bad opsec like sharing names and emails across social media. Here, the dude linked to his own Instagram account. In the NC governor case, the dude used the same handle attached to the same email everywhere. It may seem obvious to us that this is creating an easily searchable permanent index of a person’s internet history, but lots of people legitimately do not understand how that works, and imagine that some obscure porn forum is relatively private.
Also, we are now in an era where most people actually have a decade or more of history on the internet which can be potentially dug up, so the media is putting more effort into pulling those threads.
I guess I always thought there was room to deny it as they can’t say someone didnt hack his email and setup the account and say all those things. Of course it might be outlandish given how far back messages might go, but still, I thought it was harder to get “digital proof” so to speak.
How are news organizations suddenly tieing people to their internet handles? They have to have proof I’d think.
Is this the new thing cause I’m sure a ton of people thought they could say whatever under a random name and noone would ever know.
From the article:
Apparently, this guy left a huge trail… Edit: plus data breaches…
It’s always just bad opsec like sharing names and emails across social media. Here, the dude linked to his own Instagram account. In the NC governor case, the dude used the same handle attached to the same email everywhere. It may seem obvious to us that this is creating an easily searchable permanent index of a person’s internet history, but lots of people legitimately do not understand how that works, and imagine that some obscure porn forum is relatively private.
Also, we are now in an era where most people actually have a decade or more of history on the internet which can be potentially dug up, so the media is putting more effort into pulling those threads.
I guess I always thought there was room to deny it as they can’t say someone didnt hack his email and setup the account and say all those things. Of course it might be outlandish given how far back messages might go, but still, I thought it was harder to get “digital proof” so to speak.