- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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.
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Make a torrent and it will be on the internet forever.
Given how small a dataset it is, in addition tona torrent it can also be shared in an ever growing list of Mega links.
Ideally in different rar with different passwords to generate different hashes
That doesn’t seem to be what they want, and they are sending a bunch of flying monkeys after everyone that asks for it.
If it’s small could it be incorporated in the Bitcoin blockchain?
Shut the fuck up with this bullshit. No one wants the blockchain.
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.
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…
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%.
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.
Someone who hates blockchains should be pushing for this destruction. Clearly these visceral responses are not based on logic.
THANK YOU. You get it.
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.
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
The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault,
That’s not was DDOS means: Distributed Denial of Service
…meaning it comes from so many different sources its very hard to block.
It’s the daily beast, would not be surprised if the article was AI hallucinated based on a few tweets or something
Is it possible to filter posts by url on lemmy? I don’t want to see more daily beast slop…
The reason I used Daily Beast was because I was looking for info on Icelist earlier today to see if there was any news on what happened … and Daily Beast was the only site that had up-to-date info.
AI doesn’t know that.
It’s a common acronym. This isn’t the kind of thing an LLM would screw up, in my experience, I’d put my money on human error for this one.
It sounds to me like a simple region block would do the trick nicely. It’s not like this website is intended for a Russian audience so block them all and be done with it.
The article literakky says “a huge number of IPs”. Do you have more information?
I gave the proper definition of the acronym where the article did not. I’m not making commentary on the article topic.
Sorry I misread your comment.
You are right, this definition is wrong.
No worries!
Oh noes. So horrible that there are no other ways this can be disseminated and I am SURE the organizers aren’t looking into those at all.
I guess the more interesting question is… is this putin or is it just a black hat for hire working out of russia?
If they were interested in actually distributing this they would have just sent a CSV file of the entire list out and the whole list would be floating around social media already. This is a fucking scam.
I’m no expert, but I can think of a few reasons: maintaining an official signed source, data integrity, and complying with takedown regulations:
Your Responsibilities as a Whistleblower
Media and Public Disclosure
Public disclosure receives the least protection under most laws and carries the highest risk. It may be protected in limited circumstances, such as when:
- You reasonably believe disclosure serves the public interest
- You’ve attempted other channels without success
- There’s immediate danger requiring public warning
Even then, protection is uncertain and depends heavily on specific circumstances and applicable laws.
High risk along with public identification means the leaker probably wants to comply as much as possible to state and federal law. From the article:
Skinner said he planned to publish “the majority” of verifiable names, while carving out exceptions for positions like childcare workers and nurses
Yeah it totally makes sense to make a resource that is totally inaccessible and doesn’t actually exist.
Well, it’s inaccessible because Russian state-sponsored hacking collective is DDoSing the leaker’s website. Why would someone go through the risky process of leaking sensitive federal data that doesn’t actually exist?
I suppose it could be to spook ICE into withdrawal, but I don’t think that’s going to stop them given the tenacity of their extremely broad mandate and excessive deployments.
Or, it could be to goad Russian state actors into a honeypot to uncover their state affiliations, but they are generally insulated from that as a matter of Russian operating procedure.
I don’t see a possible benefit to faking this list. Could you provide an example?
To gather up a list of thousands of leftists who tried to access it without a VPN or TOR?
That’s a great example, and it probably falls under retaliation protections which I would not expect the US government to uphold at this time. So, anyone trying to access this website should definitely use TOR.
However, the fact that a Russian state actor is successfully attempting to limit access is pretty telling that they and the Trump administration don’t want this information leaked. My guess is that they know this information not only exists, but is dangerous to their interests.
I’m sure sending out a list with none of the associated verification information wouldn’t have any weaknesses to manipulation or falsification…
Good point. Making a list that no one can access and probably doesn’t actually exist is much better.
You’re not wrong, on the ice list sure they’re harping hard for donations and coffee money. Just release the files ffs. Ha now that sounds familiar.
Does Putin want fascism or civil war in the US?
Trying to get into the mind of a deranged fascist is a futile effort at the best of times.
But my speculation? He understands that trump is a real shit asset. Way too impulsive and he is rapidly reaching the point where even video of him sucking off bill clinton won’t make a difference (and, thus, won’t be a threat). And putin is competing with all the other people pulling trump’s strings who don’t need to get on a plane to intimidate him.
So either way works. The point is to negate the US as a threat (either by turning us into an ally or letting us murder each other) and, as a result, negate NATO as a threat. Because most of NATO aren’t fucking lunatics who put a massive percentage of one of the largest GPDs in the world into a standing military. WE were the army of NATO. And… yeah.
I was thinking something like if he wants fascism, then helping prevent this doxing makes sense. If he wants civil war, then do nothing and let the list get out.
Yes
So Russian criminals are helping American GeStaPo fascists in taking over the country? What a coincidence…
Birds of a shitfeather flock together, Randy
Shitapples, Randy. Shitapples.
Shitapillers
You don’t think their names aren’t in the files? Can’t be heads off state from all over the world have so much power being a literal pedophile is the only way to get their heart pumping. Strangling women on the interstate just doesn’t hit the same after a while. (I’m not joking. Or leaders are no better than you average psychopath, the only difference is they are in power and can get away with it.)
Let’s see some email leaks that connect the dots there as well to this attack.
I bet it exists somewhere.
So . . . Trump reached out to daddy for help.
Putin - Who’s your friend?
Trump - You are, boss. It’s only you.
FYI - I was able to get through to the Icelist wiki page which now has a 403 Forbidden on it. I don’t know who controls the site rn.
It’s all working pretty smoothly for me now. I think it’s been resolved.
Since when did the first D in DDOS stand for DIRECT and not DISTRIBUTED?
Never, and attributing the use of Russian IPs to the Russian state for a DDOS attack is baseless speculation. This article is uninformed clickbait horseshit.
It is the Daily Beast. They’re basically the Weekly World News of internet media outlets. Surprised they haven’t yet reported on what Bat Boy is doing.
@phutatorius@lemmy.zip care to explain your disapproval of our discussion?
Gladly.
The discussion about whether a DDOS account has anything to do with Russia solely because the IP addresses used are Russian fails to take into account the fact that Russian state actors and affiliated parties have previously done it that way. That includes attacks against sites that I work on. Not only DDOS attacks, but lots of vulnerability-probing attacks have come from Russian IPs as well (though not all, of course: China’s a close second on that leaderboard), and in one investigation of those, our security team was able to find a forum where the attacks were being coordinated. The discussion was in Russian. That doesn’t mean they were state actors in that case, but Russia’s not the kind of place where freelancers are allowed to operate against state interests for long. So maybe volunteers for the motherland, maybe mercenaries, maybe someone with a more formal relationship with the state. In that particular case, we stopped investigating at that point, since our goal was to harden our system further, rather than worry about attribution.
So yeah, you’d think that in the interest of good comsec, they’d go to the effort to obfuscate the origin of their attacks, but they don’t always. Maybe they’re sloppy, or they don’t see the need, or don’t want to incur the minimal additional complexity and/or cost.
I’d like to disclose more, but I’m in a position where there are some hard limits on what I can disclose about my personal and professional life.
Also, the Daily Beast is no paragon of journalistic integrity, but they’re more a mixed bag than a never-credible source. Case in point: Michael Wolff’s podcasts for them, which occasionally contain worthwhile insights mixed in with the tabloid gossip. I rank them a little below Times Radio, which also has a mix of clickbaity crap and occasional sound analysis. They’re certainly nowhere near the gutter that the NY Post or the Daily Mail inhabit. Well, maybe one foot, but not both.
Anyway… mea culpa for having downvoted rather than joining in. I was in a hurry, about to head out the door, and should have instead waited until I had the time to comment.
Make the static dataset available on IPFS and you’ll have node operators pin it on their instance. Good luck taking that down.
I’d be okay with a torrent as well.
Isn’t it Distributed Denial of Service for DDOS?
It is. This is a quality article.
Why Russia would protect this administration interests like that?
To further destabilize the country.
It is serving their interests.
Would it not be more destabilizing to allow this leak to go through? Seems like by stopping this, they are propping up the government?
The government is not the country.
The sense of justice is being denied. The feeling of their oppressor being shielded is prolonged.
They want citizens boiling.
It’s ridiculous that people in this thread actually believe this. Why would they use russian IPs if it was a russian DDOS attack, lol. It would be like signing your name on a bomb threat.
Why would they use russian IPs if it was a russian DDOS attack, lol
Because theres no reason not to.
Why would they care if they are identified? Who’s going to do ANYTHING about it?
Also, maybe they WANT the world to know they can do things like this, like changing votes in an election. If you want the world to know you are in control, you have to demonstrate it.
or it could simply be a red herring because russia = bad, so therefore it must be true because they are also bad.
What do you suppose they have to lose from such a brazen attack in defence of the interests of the leader at the expense of the people he hates?
Or poisoning your dissidents with a compound only used by the Russian government.
This is a classic case of VPN
Or botnet of infected computers (not excluding VPN use).
Well they paid for it…
Yeah this probably should have been archived offline immediately and then spread around to decentralize it.
This is a scam. No one ever saw this list and it would have been trivial to distribute if that was ever the intent.
I saw the list yesterday for a few minutes. Then it crashed.
Why do you think they didn’t just distribute a 50kb CSV file so that everyone on earth could have it today?
You should ask them.
Removed by mod
Then don’t believe me. No skin off my ass.
Good luck with all the IPs your gathering into this honeypot. Hope folks had their VPNs turned on when they tried it.
For anyone else reading this, here is what is happening:
Post fake list.
No one can get it, but thousands of people try.
Oops, we got hacked.
Two months later.
Hey, why is MY house the one that got visited by ICE?
Ah the ‘Epstein list isn’t real’ phase of denial. How gauche.
Just to be clear, you are equating wanting to actually see proof of this list of ICE agents before accepting that its real with denying the Epstein files. Are you OK, dude?
I saw the list. It contains names, photos, linked in profiles, job position in ICE, etc.
EDIT: I will add, whether this whole thing is fake or not, I saw a list. the website had names, linkedin, etc. This data is completely unverified. I admit it seem a little off. But the website listed did in fact have names and links.
Awesome! Want to share the cached page or anything that you managed to grab while you were there? Even a screen shot?
You can’t place ads next to a CSV file.
Exactly, and that’s the best-case scenario.
It’s back up. It’s not a scam.
And can we maybe not continually, without fail, hit ourselves in the face with a crowbar, because something positive isn’t perfect?
The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia
Putin and his Black Hundreds trying to protect the little army of Kluxers in olive drab.
Now why on earth would Russia want to halt the leak? Especially when they’re so mad at us about Venezuela and the oil we’re seizing? 🤔
They aren’t. Owe a bank 10 bucks, it’s your problem. Owe a bank a million, it’s their problem. Those countries gave their gold and resources to Russia. Now, when they expect to receive support back, the US is giving them an excuse why they don’t need to as long as they perform a bit of false flag theater they are so accustomed to. Venezuela’s oil is hard to refine cheaply and Russia has plenty not to mention they are a competitor, they are more concerned about the US Chevron and Exxon tankers Ukraine is disrupting from buying their oil after Trump quietly allowed them to resume.
Russia wants to assist Trump while feigning their part as the “enemy”, yet they always manage to work lockstep in the grand scheme of things. So much so, that I expect that when the US does launch an operation against Greenland, they will try to be sneaky about it yet do it with Russia’s help, likely from one the detachments claiming to be following one of the shadow fleets.
Russia considers its allies temporary and expendable, they’ve sacrificed theirs in negotiations to cooperate with the US to divide up their direct influence into hemispheres. Russia is specially interested in restoring the old USSR borders, but now just any win will do. Getting rid of competitors and letting go of the political baggage of their allies once exhausted is what they do. The regime puppets have already sent all their gold to Russia to try to secure their retirement within their borders. Russia treats its allies like the US is starting to.
Never ceases to amaze me that people refuse to believe or need to be reminded that Russia, China and others are actively and aggressively trying to undermine political and social stability in the US. Social media troll farms and bots, hacks of infrastructure, and apparently now preventing leaks of information detrimental to trump’s SS.
They do but don’t forget the us government is trying to do the same thing by breaking with norms and stiring up trouble.
This can easily be a a hit by an us funded group or agency to prevent waking of the gestapo.
All they needed to do was put out a torrent.
Get ready for a bunch of totally not foreign propaganda bots to explain why that doesn’t make any sense and that somehow YOU are the crazy person for expecting this list to actually exist.
