Massive ICE Goon ID Leak Halted by Cyber Attack From Russia

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...

There are much simpler ways to ensure data integrity without resorting to blockchain.

All we need to do is simply put this out as a torrent and provide a hash. That's it. Easy.

At 51% attack cannot succeed if you're not using blockchain to begin with. So why take the risk?

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.

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.

In an ideal world, as they see your knowledge is harder and harder to replace, they’ll start paying more for it

This is true and happens to me.

, and that will hopefully be encouraging enough to the current workforce to learn the skills.

Here's the challenge. Someone new that doesn't have the skills that is enticed by the money has to make two evaluations:

• How hard is it to learn the skill?
• How long with the skill be marketable?

For me to learn the skill wasn't difficult because is it was modern and contemporary technology at the time. Training and support resources existed, and I was able to incrementally learn how those older technologies continued to evolve or be accommodated as new technologies arrived to replace them, but then didn't. That won't be the case for someone new. They can't even use the old training material I used (assuming it was even still around) because that was written assuming the technology pervasive and well supported while the opposite is true today.

As for marketability, this is an even larger gamble. Many of these technologies should have been retired decades ago, but weren't for a variety of niche reasons. No organizations are putting out new deployments of these old technologies. The customer base/employers wanting these skills decrease every year as old legacy systems are finally retired leaving even fewer opportunities for a new person to exercise these newly acquired old skills. Its a fact that someday there will be no users of them, but when will that be? It should have happened already so what new worker would want to try and gamble on going into extensive learning on technologies that should be dead by the time they master them?

I remember back in the day in my highschool computer science class, altering the autoexec.bat to mess with the next student in fun ways. Nothing that would stop them, but simply give them pause.

I had to learn how to navigate Windows 3.0 using keyboard commands with no screen. I had to fix the resolution when I set it too high and the display was a 4 pixel tall line across the screen. Way back before preview and accept changes existed.

No worries!

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?

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.

You should ask them.

You can’t place ads next to a CSV file.

ICE agents aren't going to quit over doxxing, they're the type to jerk off over the idea of someone trying to hurt them or their family.

If America was going to rise up, seeing ice agents get got in their own home would be inspirational, in the same way a burning police station was inspiration in 2020; showing people that you're not powerless does infinitely more to bring people out than seeing a million people march for 6 hours and go home having accomplished nothing.