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.

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      69
      ·
      2 days ago

      Given how small a dataset it is, in addition tona torrent it can also be shared in an ever growing list of Mega links.

    • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 days ago

      That doesn’t seem to be what they want, and they are sending a bunch of flying monkeys after everyone that asks for it.

      • VieuxQueb@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 day ago

        Wow I love the downvotes at the mere mention of the blockchain, but for once it would be useful to have a self replicating, far spreading and impossible for anyone to delete completely dataset. But yay at least people have an instant repulsive reaction to bitcoin lol

        • rumba@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 day ago

          If you want to go for the record, mention AI too. and include an EM dash and some emoji. Lemmy has some phobias. I’d say it’s all rightly found apprehension, but they take it personally if it looks like anything came from AI.

        • pivot_root@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          24
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          2 days ago

          It’s not entirely a stupid idea.

          Block-chains are an append-only ledger where each block includes a cryptographic hash of the previous block, where new blocks are accepted by quorum across all independent nodes. The only way to fuck with the ledger to erase history would be to either exploit an undisclosed flaw in the cryptographic hash, or have enough nodes to convince the every other node that their version of history is wrong and that this fake version of history is the only truth.

          Burning an undisclosed cryptographic vulnerability for this would be an extremely stupid (but plausible) idea that would make the vulnerability worthless to them in the future. Even if they didn’t have to burn a vulnerability to break the block-chain’s system of trust by rewriting history, they just proved that bitcoin is untrustworthy—which would immediately destroy its financial value.

          What might actually be even better, though, is that multimillionaires, billionaires, and the United States government itself hold a bunch of cryptocurrency. The former for investment/tax evasion/laundering, and the latter in seized assets. On top of that, many criminals and hostile foreign governments hold Bitcoin, too.

          Encoding the list in the Etherium or Bitcoin block-chains would make removing it extremely self-destructive for the fascists who don’t want the list to be public. It becomes a lose-lose situation for them.

          A bittorrent magnet link or IPFS would be less wasteful, but they lack the self-destructive disincentive that would make them think twice about even trying to stop it.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            21 hours ago

            If you put it on IPFS, there’s a chance that it wouldn’t be reachable anyway; it’s been going downhill for a while. I tried some projects with it a year ago, and the results were not inspiring.

            A magnet would be good, fast and easy, hell, just giving people the list and writing, keep a copy of this in case it ever disappears off the net, would work pretty well.

            The problem I see is that the list needs to be mutable. That wiki is there to accept crowd-sourced help. Simply making it accessible to the masses makes it a target.

            It needs to be resilient, multi-homed, easily hosted, accessible by the masses, but managed only by the organizers. A blockchain-based DB could handle a lot of that, but new information still needs to be added in a way that makes it impossible to decoy. The front end needs to be easy to access and easy to edit. Some form of list-of-lists approach with new keys to add/remove data.

            It would be overkill for this project, but building a blockchain-backed, secure, distributed, and anonymous document store wouldn’t be the worst thing until the worst people started using it for bad things. Learn from IPFS’s index failings.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            There are much simpler ways to ensure data integrity without resorting to blockchain.

            All we need to do is simply put this out as a torrent and provide a hash. That’s it. Easy.

            At 51% attack cannot succeed if you’re not using blockchain to begin with. So why take the risk?

            • pivot_root@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 day ago

              As I said in both my original comment and my follow-up replies to other people, the point is to create a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation which would have real consequences for trying to suppress. With bittorrent and IPFS, there’s zero consequences for them to try other than wasting their time and own money.

              The correct approach is to use all 3 for redundancy.

          • zbyte64@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            10
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            2 days ago

            Or you could just use a magnet link to circulate the torrent and use the DHT as your “block chain”. No need to add more moving parts…

            • pivot_root@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              8
              ·
              edit-2
              2 days ago

              Or do all of the above? It ain’t limited to one choice.

              Entangling the destruction of the list with the destruction of cryptocurrency itself isn’t a bad thing either. If they impulsively destroy the value of bitcoin, they hurt the people whos opinions they actually care about: the 0.01%.

          • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            Except the 51% owner of the block chain can overwrite the ledger and billionaires and hostile governments have all of the computers to do it. This has already happened multiple times with smaller coins IIRC.

            Block chain is essentially just the techbro version of capitalism (not an alternative, a recreation). If there are distributed companies and enough competition, the system works pretty well, but when everything centralizes as has inevitably happened everywhere, the rules all get thrown away.

            • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 day ago

              Someone who hates blockchains should be pushing for this destruction. Clearly these visceral responses are not based on logic.

            • pivot_root@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              edit-2
              1 day ago

              I mentioned that, and yes, that’s the point. If they do that, they destroy trust in it. If they destroy trust in it, they destroy its value. The people they actually care about—the multimillionaires and billionaires—hold some as part of their portfolios and are going to be very unhappy about that.

              It’s a lose-lose scenario. They either leave it up, or they make an enemy out of their backers.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        it’s a list of names and their linked in addresses and their images when available. I suspect they just scraped linkedin for anyone that put it in their profile, but it could have been more. There’s another section with images of cars being used. and a section to crowdsource identifying images and tying them to names.

        The people who made it still have the data and could release it tons of ways. The point behind the wiki was to probably to make a living db, allowing crowdsourcing and families outing them which will alwyas be vulnerable to even the most hamfisted attacks.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 day ago

        Every solution is a hammer isn’t it?

        I broke my toe last week, how can Blockchain help with that?