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.
While Skinner told the Beast that it was only possible to “speculate” about who might have directed the attack, he revealed that a large amount of traffic on Wednesday had come from Russia, likely from a bot farm hosted there.
“The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,” he said, adding, “An attack lasting this long is sophisticated, though.”
Despite having DDOS protections in place, such attacks are very difficult to prevent, Skinner admitted, saying: “It has happened before, and it will happen again, no doubt.” he confirmed his team was in the process of moving servers to get it back online.
“The attacker doesn’t want others to access the site,” he added. “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. Given their behavior lately, and how they are increasingly viewed negatively by the public, that’s no surprise.”
Skinner told the Beast that a DHS whistleblower allegedly handed ICE List a dataset covering roughly 4,500 immigration personnel—about 1,800 “on-the-ground” agents and around 150 supervisors—after the Jan. 7 killing of Good, 37, sparked outrage inside and outside government.
The material ICE List received on Monday includes names, work email addresses, phone numbers, job titles and roles, and résumé-style background information such as previous employment, he said.
Skinner argued the shooting of Good, an unarmed mother, was “the last straw” for some staffers. Before the dump, ICE List said it already held information on about 2,000 federal immigration employees—roughly 800 of them frontline or eligible to deputize—bringing the total cache to around 6,500.
Skinner said he planned to publish “the majority” of verifiable names, while carving out exceptions for positions like childcare workers and nurses.
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