ICE List says website was hit just as it prepared to publish names of federal immigration staff leaked by an alleged whistleblower.

A website dedicated to naming ICE and Border Patrol employees is coming under a “prolonged and sophisticated” cyber attack after the Daily Beast revealed it planned to make public 4,500 names of federal immigration staff.

The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia after the Beast reported that a huge cache of personal IDs had been leaked to the site by an alleged Department of Homeland Security whistleblower.

The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault, which began on Tuesday evening and is still ongoing at the time of publication, saw a huge number of IPs simultaneously access the website of ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative.”

This has successfully overloaded the ICE List’s servers and is preventing people from accessing the site. The timing coincided with ICE List founder Dominick Skinner telling the Daily Beast he would make public the first tranche of names in the dataset, which was leaked following the shooting by an ICE agent of mom Renee Nicole Good.

      • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
        0·
        9 months ago

        Would it not be more destabilizing to allow this leak to go through? Seems like by stopping this, they are propping up the government?

        • hunnybubny@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          9 months ago

          The government is not the country.

          The sense of justice is being denied. The feeling of their oppressor being shielded is prolonged.

          They want citizens boiling.

    • tehsillz@lemmy.world
      0·
      9 months ago

      It’s ridiculous that people in this thread actually believe this. Why would they use russian IPs if it was a russian DDOS attack, lol. It would be like signing your name on a bomb threat.

      • cockmushroom@reddthat.com
        0·
        9 months ago

        What do you suppose they have to lose from such a brazen attack in defence of the interests of the leader at the expense of the people he hates?

      • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Or poisoning your dissidents with a compound only used by the Russian government.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
        0·
        9 months ago

        Why would they care if they are identified? Who’s going to do ANYTHING about it?

        Also, maybe they WANT the world to know they can do things like this, like changing votes in an election. If you want the world to know you are in control, you have to demonstrate it.

        • tehsillz@lemmy.world
          0·
          9 months ago

          or it could simply be a red herring because russia = bad, so therefore it must be true because they are also bad.

      • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
        0·
        9 months ago

        Why would they use russian IPs if it was a russian DDOS attack, lol

        Because theres no reason not to.

  • RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    9 months ago

    Massive ICE Goon ID Leak Halted by Cyber Attack From Russia

    My mind went somewhere totally different reading “goon leak”

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      0·
      9 months ago

      It sounds like the website was attacked, but that doesn’t mean they stole the data. Presumably there’s back-up, and it can be released elsewhere. Just don’t announce it in advance. Put it out there, spread the word quietly until there have been a bunch of downloads, then announce it.

  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Whoever has this info, if its real is a moron bar none. One torrent and by now it would be everywhere. Instead they create a puff website for it.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    Never ceases to amaze me that people refuse to believe or need to be reminded that Russia, China and others are actively and aggressively trying to undermine political and social stability in the US. Social media troll farms and bots, hacks of infrastructure, and apparently now preventing leaks of information detrimental to trump’s SS.

    • prenatal_confusion@feddit.org
      0·
      9 months ago

      They do but don’t forget the us government is trying to do the same thing by breaking with norms and stiring up trouble.

      This can easily be a a hit by an us funded group or agency to prevent waking of the gestapo.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
      0·
      9 months ago

      Honestly, what would Russia’s motivation be? Releasing the names of those agents would, per my ignorance, be a passive win for Russia. Russian propaganda has shown that they explicitly take both sides of a political argument, which only yields more polarizing views on the matter. That’s their goal—polarize enemies to weaken their unity, attention, and effectiveness. Having us focus on vendettas against ICE serves that goal. It clarifies who our enemy is and increases the chance of more violence. Why would Russia want to stop that?

      Wild speculation here, but what would the chances be that the US has control over of Russia-based bot net? Because that would be a pretty convenient tool for a state like the US.

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        9 months ago

        what would the chances be that the US has control over of Russia-based bot net?

        I would be highly surprised if we didn’t. I’d be surprised if any nation with any kind of serious cyber presence didn’t have resources like that in adversarial spaces.

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
    0·
    9 months ago

    Make the static dataset available on IPFS and you’ll have node operators pin it on their instance. Good luck taking that down.

    I’d be okay with a torrent as well.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      9 months ago

      Never, and attributing the use of Russian IPs to the Russian state for a DDOS attack is baseless speculation. This article is uninformed clickbait horseshit.

          • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
            0·
            8 months ago

            Gladly.

            The discussion about whether a DDOS account has anything to do with Russia solely because the IP addresses used are Russian fails to take into account the fact that Russian state actors and affiliated parties have previously done it that way. That includes attacks against sites that I work on. Not only DDOS attacks, but lots of vulnerability-probing attacks have come from Russian IPs as well (though not all, of course: China’s a close second on that leaderboard), and in one investigation of those, our security team was able to find a forum where the attacks were being coordinated. The discussion was in Russian. That doesn’t mean they were state actors in that case, but Russia’s not the kind of place where freelancers are allowed to operate against state interests for long. So maybe volunteers for the motherland, maybe mercenaries, maybe someone with a more formal relationship with the state. In that particular case, we stopped investigating at that point, since our goal was to harden our system further, rather than worry about attribution.

            So yeah, you’d think that in the interest of good comsec, they’d go to the effort to obfuscate the origin of their attacks, but they don’t always. Maybe they’re sloppy, or they don’t see the need, or don’t want to incur the minimal additional complexity and/or cost.

            I’d like to disclose more, but I’m in a position where there are some hard limits on what I can disclose about my personal and professional life.

            Also, the Daily Beast is no paragon of journalistic integrity, but they’re more a mixed bag than a never-credible source. Case in point: Michael Wolff’s podcasts for them, which occasionally contain worthwhile insights mixed in with the tabloid gossip. I rank them a little below Times Radio, which also has a mix of clickbaity crap and occasional sound analysis. They’re certainly nowhere near the gutter that the NY Post or the Daily Mail inhabit. Well, maybe one foot, but not both.

            Anyway… mea culpa for having downvoted rather than joining in. I was in a hurry, about to head out the door, and should have instead waited until I had the time to comment.