Trolling Online For Real World Identities

Anonymity on social networks can be an excellent tool. Given the recent events with Arab Spring it is difficult to argue that anonymity on social networks has not been proven as a tool for social change. Unfortunately, anonymity can also lead to the celebration of depraved acts, such as animal abuse. In these cases anonymity is being abused. Username reuse has been identified as a potential tool to profile individuals using social networks. Context clues are used to develop a likelihood of identification across social networking sites, and to gather further information about the person behind the screen name. In order to gain a higher level of verification this paper proposes that trolling, as explained at Defcon 19, can be used as the means to verification of username reuse and individual identification in the medium of social networking.