The dissemination in March of hundreds of private data of officials and high-ranking state security personnel has activated an investigation that remains open and that, at this point, is already very advanced. The intelligence services and the information units of the National Police and the Civil Guard maintain the search for the alleged perpetrator, while the portal used to publish that information, Doxbin, has ceased to be accessible on the open web.
Among those affected are Pedro Sánchez, some relatives of the president, prosecutors, judges, Treasury technicians, as well as commanders and agents of the Police and the Civil Guard. Data of persons integrated into the Department of National Security, attached to the Presidency of the Government, and of the director of the National Intelligence Center, Esperanza Casteleiro, were also disseminated.
An investigation underway into the author's trail
The police and intelligence operation continues in progress. Investigators maintain that they are close to following the steps of the perpetrator and are working with the suspicion that it could be a young person, even a minor. For now, no arrest directly related to this massive data dissemination has come to light.
Doxbin was a forum specialized in doxing, a practice that consists of exposing sensitive data of a person on the internet or in identifying who hides behind an alias. Between February and March, the portal's activity focused on publications with leaked data of officials and high-ranking officers linked to the Police and the Civil Guard. Among the people affected by these publications is the general commissioner of Information of the National Police.
Profiles of the Government and of the Prosecutor's Office among those affected
In the disseminated documentation, profiles linked to Pedro Sánchez's Government also appeared. Among them is Teresa Peramato, identified as the current Attorney General. Also listed are Dolores Delgado, former head of the Attorney General's Office, former minister in Sánchez's first Government and current coordinating prosecutor for Human Rights and Democratic Memory of the Prosecutor's Office, and María José Segarra, Delgado's predecessor at the head of the public prosecution service and today coordinating prosecutor for Persons with Disabilities and the Elderly at the Attorney General's Office.
Expert sources in this type of environment maintain that it is not in itself an attack nor a leak in the strict sense, although they place it closer to the latter. The mechanism, they explain, involves selecting data from massive leaks already published on the deep web to track specific people or determined patterns, such as police email domains or addresses of public centers, and from there compile lists.
The fall of Doxbin and the backups off the open web
The portal where those data were published is no longer operational. The website has been taken down and has disappeared from the network, although backups continue to exist in the so-called deep web. That circumstance complicates the total removal of the material and forces researchers to maintain vigilance over possible replicas or new publications.
The pressure on this type of platforms is also part of broader operations against forums dedicated to the trafficking and dissemination of personal data. Guardia Civil and Policía Nacional have recently participated in an international operation coordinated by Europol in 14 countries against LeakBase, considered one of the main forums for buying and selling personal data obtained largely from databases of large companies and from domestic devices infected with malware.
LeakBase had data from more than 142,000 users. In Spain, within that operation, there was the arrest of one person and two searches in the provinces of La Coruña and Vizcaya. In those actions, numerous computer material and documentation were seized. Meanwhile, the investigation into the exposure of data of high-ranking officials and state employees remains open, with the focus on identifying and locating the person responsible for a publication that has affected sensitive structures of the Administration and public security.