.jpg?width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Website that leaked thousands of ICE agents’ personal information is down after huge ‘Russian cyberattack,’ founder says – UK Times")
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.
“The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,” Skinner told the publication. “An attack lasting this long is sophisticated, though.”
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The attack, Skinner said, occurred as he prepared to publicly identify the names of immigration law enforcement officers that were obtained in a dataset from the whistleblower.
The ICE List founder had previously told The Daily Beast that a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower provided a dataset of approximately 4,500 immigration personnel after the shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Some of the information in the dataset included names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles and other background information. Skinner said he planned to make a “majority” of the names public but would provide exceptions for those working in childcare or serving as nurses.
DHS has criticized Skinner’s website calling it “disgusting doxxing of our officers” that puts “their lives and their families in serious danger.”
Homeland Security Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has said law enforcement are facing a 1,300 percent increase in assaults and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats agains them.
“Their families are being threatened. We will not back down. Anyone who doxxes our officers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” McLaughlin has warned.
ICE List is hosted in the Netherlands so it cannot be taken down by the U.S. government.
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 its kind are difficult to prevent and likely to happen again.
