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.
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.