A website dedicated to leaking personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents was reportedly subject to a cyber attack that its founder believes may have originated in Russia.

Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, told The Daily Beast that his website, ICE List, came under cyberattack Tuesday evening after the publication reported Skinner planned to release personal information, obtained through a whistleblower, about thousands of employees.

The attack, known as a Direct Denial of Service, is when a perpetrator seeks to disrupt access to a network or service by flooding it with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload the system.

Skinner told The Daily Beast that a massive number of IPs began accessing the website and a large amount of the traffick appeared to come from Russia – leading the founder to speculate the attack originated there.

  • modus@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Of course it’s down. Whether DDoS’d or Hugged-to-death, it’s vulnerable. Why don’t they just distribute it as a torrent?

  • D_C@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    When Putin is helping you out then you absolutely know you are on the wrong side, even though you’ll not admit to it. A bunch of indirect russian stooges dressed up in military gear, all prancing around like 15 year olds acting tough to attract the girlies.

        • 🏴حمید پیام عباسی🏴@crazypeople.online
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          2 days ago

          Where in that article did you find evidence that Russia obviously did it? Because that isn’t what is in the article you posted

          Skinner told The Daily Beast that a massive number of IPs began accessing the website, and a large amount of the traffic appeared to come from Russia – leading the founder to speculate the attack originated there.

          “The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,”

          Who or what is “Russia” in your take here? The Russian government? Or Russian people? Just saying Russia did it makes no sense. Russia is a land mass in Europe and Asia and can’t itself operate a computer. This is especially muddied when you realize people in Russia run the largest Hacking-as-a-service server farms so, yeah, the traffic and the bots came from inside Russia but there is no indication of who paid for it or why. If I downloaded Tor and hired DDOS as a service or Ransomware as a service like Akira, did Russia do that or did Mexico do it? Was it Mexico as a whole because I live there or a Mexican person?

          Skinner said whoever is attacking the website “doesn’t want others to access the site.”

          “But it just makes us more determined, because it is clear some people out there do not want the names of ICE and Border Patrol agents made public,” Skinner told The Daily Beast. “Given their behavior lately, and how they are increasingly viewed negatively by the public, that’s no surprise.”

          The ICE List founder said he and his team have Direct Denial of Service protections in place, but that attacks of this kind are difficult to prevent and likely to happen again.

          It probably was ICE who hired them to take the doxxing site down if you use Occam’s razor.

  • Batman@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Come to think of it, do we even know these ice agents aren’t Russian nationals?

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Since when did we start calling it direct denial of service? Hasn’t it always been distributed denial of service?

    • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Since AI is writing the articles and people are doing a bad job editing the output, or not even bothering to edit it.

      • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yes, but ICE list was hosted by Cloudflare, and their whole shtick is being able to withstand DDoS.

        • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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          I never hit cloudflare turnstile or error pages the last time I loaded it while it was impacted. Right now the IP and ASN returned are not associated with cloudflare. I think they are hosting it without a CDN which means if the server gets a lot of traffic or DDOSed it will go down.

    • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Might not be distributed. They could have just found a really slow page and loaded it in a maximally inconvenient manner. The thing is a wiki running on php and mediawiki has a lot of dynamic pages. It may also be a typo

      • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        At that point what you’re arguing is just a denial of service (DoS). These things have been figured out for decades. There is no need to defend poor journalism.

      • moopet@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        it says “a massive number of IPs began accessing the website” which means it’s distributed. Mind, they also spelt traffic wrong so who knows.

  • Greyghoster@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    Russian and/or criminal? What would they be interested in this site? Anything to do with the Epstein files?