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.
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.