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.

  • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
    3·
    1 day 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
      2·
      11 hours 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.