A website that publishes personal information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents was reportedly hit by a cyberattack — one its founder suspects may have involved traffic routed through Russia.
Dominick Skinner, a Netherlands-based immigration activist, told The Daily Beast that his site, ICE List, began coming under attack Tuesday evening. The disruption followed reporting that Skinner planned to publish personal information — obtained through a whistleblower — tied to thousands of employees.
The incident was described as a Direct Denial of Service attack, in which a service is overwhelmed by a flood of requests designed to knock it offline.
Skinner said a surge of IP addresses started hammering the website, and that a significant portion of the traffic appeared to originate from Russia, prompting him to speculate about the source.
“The IPs would be run through proxies before hitting our servers, meaning it’s just impossible to track the source,” Skinner told the publication. “An attack lasting this long is sophisticated, though.”
Skinner said the attack began as he was preparing to publicly identify immigration enforcement officers whose names were included in a dataset he says came from a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower.
He previously told The Daily Beast that the whistleblower provided a dataset containing information on roughly 4,500 immigration personnel after the shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis.
According to Skinner, the dataset includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, and other background details. He said he intended to publish a “majority” of the names, while excluding certain individuals — including those working in childcare or serving as nurses.
The Department of Homeland Security has condemned the site, calling it “disgusting doxxing of our officers” and warning it could put “their lives and their families in serious danger.”
Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has said law enforcement officers are facing a 1,300 percent increase in assaults and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats.
“Their families are being threatened. We will not back down. Anyone who doxxes our officers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” McLaughlin has warned.
Because ICE List is hosted in the Netherlands, Skinner has argued it cannot be taken down by the U.S. government.
Skinner said the goal of the attack appeared straightforward: stop people from reaching the website.
“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,” Skinner told The Daily Beast. “Given their behavior lately, and how they are increasingly viewed negatively by the public, that’s no surprise.”
He added that the team has Direct Denial of Service protections in place, but that attacks like this are difficult to fully block — and could happen again.
