A controversial website launched following an apparent insider breach at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been taken offline by a sustained DDoS attack, its founder has revealed.
Dominick Skinner told The Daily Beast that his ICE List site is being hit with a “prolonged and sophisticated” cyber-attack which began on Tuesday evening.
At the time of writing, it was still down, making it impossible for interested parties to uncover the identities of agents working for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.
Skinner claimed the traffic overwhelming the site is coming from a Russian bot farm. That doesn’t necessarily mean the perpetrators are based there, as DDoS campaigns often use IP addresses in the country.
“The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,” Skinner told the site.
“An attack lasting this long is sophisticated, though.”
Read more on DDoS attacks: Cloudflare Blocks Record-Breaking 7.3 Tbps DDoS Attack
Skinner and his team are currently trying to switch servers to get the site live again, although he reportedly admitted that it would continue to be a major target for DDoS-ers.
Thousands Could Be Exposed
The self-styled “accountability initiative” was launched after a whistleblower at the DHS reportedly shared the details of 4500 ICE and Border Patrol officials, including many “on-the-ground” agents, with Skinner.
The data dump apparently included names, work email addresses, phone numbers, job titles and roles, and CV-style background information such as previous employment.
This will be combined with an existing trove of personal information on 2000 federal immigration officials, once the site goes live. It’s reportedly being hosted in the Netherlands, putting it out of the reach of US authorities.
The DHS whistleblower was moved to act following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Nicole Good, by an ICE agent in Minnesota.
Reddit users commented that a more resilient approach Skinner could have employed would be to put the controversial data in a torrent and post a link to it. This would make it harder to take down via DDoS. Another posted an archived link to the site, which is still available.
Image credit: Mehaniq / Shutterstock.com
