Who's behind Dogequest?
When I first became aware of Dogequest, I ran dirbuster on the site to see if any interesting files or folders would show up.
One such directory was /backup, which appears to be some kind of honeypot, or a digital middle finger aimed at those snooping around on the site.
The first file listed was mysqldump.zip, a typical ZIP bomb that has been floating around since at least 2019, nothing interesting.
The other file was keystore_backup.secure, which returned a 403 Forbidden error upon being accessed, so I figured maybe the denial itself was the joke then forgot about it.
A week later, 404 Media released another article about Dogequest, mentioning that the site had moved to a Tor hidden service, so I figured I’d try to download the keystore_backup.secure file from there.
To my surprise, that actually worked! Maybe file permissions were altered in transit to the new server?
The Christopher Stanley dox
Unsurprisingly, the file did not contain a backup of Dogequest’s private keys. Instead, it was a base64-encoded dox of DOGE staffer Christopher Stanley—in character with the site.
There are two noteworthy things about this paste:
It is ancient: The imgur link in the paste is dated January 30 2015, and it has a mere 20 views at the time of writing this post.
It is obscure: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, SearxNG find no relevant results for the email listed or the keywords “Christopher Stanley” “Thec0re.org”.
The only confirmation I’ve been able to find of this paste’s existence was through the specialized data search engine Intelligence X, by searching for the domains referenced in the dox:
How this paste was unearthed, and why it was added to the honeypot folder but not actually made available for download, is beyond me.
Doge Whisperer
By pure chance while browsing Bluesky, I came across the profile of Doge Whisperer (or dogginglover), an account dedicated to the naming, shaming and documenting of DOGE staffers, all of whose personal information is prominently displayed on the Dogequest map.
It was this thread about Christopher Stanley that immediately caught my eye:
It appears that the account’s owner is in possession of the same ’lost’ dox of Christopher Stanley as Dogequest.
Another thread on the account demonstrates extensive knowledge of The Post Millennial data breach, which was used in the sourcing of Dogequest’s Tesla owner directory.
Historical data shows that Doge Whisperer had reposted two now-deleted skeets about Dogequest in the late UTC hours of March 17th, from the hacktivist maia arson crimew:
link submitted to me anonymously: dogeque.st
one of the more fun things sources have sent me as of late, very fun tool for uuh “fans” of DOGE and tesla to find locations related to their fandom
Incidentally, Doge Whisperer also operates a mirror account on X under @doggingenj0yer, with the account’s first retweeter also being crimew, hinting that the two may know each other off-platform, as the X account was never promoted on Bluesky.
Finally, there is a minor detail about Doge Whisperer’s writing that happens to match that of Dogequest: curly apostrophes.
In several of Doge Whisperer’s skeets, you can notice a mixed use of straight and curly apostrophes:
This writing quirk might be indicative of paraphrasing by an LLM, the use of a foreign keyboard layout, or autocorrect on a phone/macOS device.
Somewhat supporting the third possibility, at least one of Doge’s screenshots originates from a macOS device, as confirmed by the light blue highlight with line gaps, a visual element unique to Firefox on macOS.
Regardless of the why, this quirk is also shared by the FAQ section of Dogequest:
Who is Doge Whisperer?
I don’t know.
I have not been able to find any meaningful personal information on Doge Whisperer, nor would I be comfortable with publicizing it, nor am I able to conclusively say that Doge Whisperer is the one behind Dogequest.
I’m putting this out there because it may aid someone else’s investigation, plus it’s a fun read (I hope).