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.
If they were interested in actually distributing this they would have just sent a CSV file of the entire list out and the whole list would be floating around social media already. This is a fucking scam.
You’re not wrong, on the ice list sure they’re harping hard for donations and coffee money. Just release the files ffs. Ha now that sounds familiar.
I’m no expert, but I can think of a few reasons: maintaining an official signed source, data integrity, and complying with takedown regulations:
Your Responsibilities as a Whistleblower
High risk along with public identification means the leaker probably wants to comply as much as possible to state and federal law. From the article:
Yeah it totally makes sense to make a resource that is totally inaccessible and doesn’t actually exist.
Well, it’s inaccessible because Russian state-sponsored hacking collective is DDoSing the leaker’s website. Why would someone go through the risky process of leaking sensitive federal data that doesn’t actually exist?
I suppose it could be to spook ICE into withdrawal, but I don’t think that’s going to stop them given the tenacity of their extremely broad mandate and excessive deployments.
Or, it could be to goad Russian state actors into a honeypot to uncover their state affiliations, but they are generally insulated from that as a matter of Russian operating procedure.
I don’t see a possible benefit to faking this list. Could you provide an example?
To gather up a list of thousands of leftists who tried to access it without a VPN or TOR?
That’s a great example, and it probably falls under retaliation protections which I would not expect the US government to uphold at this time. So, anyone trying to access this website should definitely use TOR.
However, the fact that a Russian state actor is successfully attempting to limit access is pretty telling that they and the Trump administration don’t want this information leaked. My guess is that they know this information not only exists, but is dangerous to their interests.
I’m sure sending out a list with none of the associated verification information wouldn’t have any weaknesses to manipulation or falsification…
Good point. Making a list that no one can access and probably doesn’t actually exist is much better.