An activist platform designed to track US immigration enforcement activity, StopICE.net, has come under fire after reports surfaced of a major data breach that allegedly compromised the personal information of over 100,000 users and handed it to federal authorities.



Why were they collecting that info to begin with? Sounds like asking for trouble.
From the posted link
Keep in mind StopICE is a website, not an app, so some of the stuff the hackers claimed they got don’t seem to make sense. The only “personal” info I see the website could collect is a phone number if you sign up for text alerts when someone posts an alert at a zip code / city / state.
Phone # seems like a scary thing to collect. Also, visiting the web site reveals an IP address, maybe not good. Wonder if there’s a more anonymous way to get the alerts out, like if some larger sites sent out alert geolocations along with regular web pages.
Eh, SMS could be a burner phone or virtual number but I sort of agree that the site could recommend people do that rather than entering their own real phone number if they want to sign up for optional SMS alerts. It’s probably one of those convenience vs privacy issues - how to enable non-tech savvy people to receive optional alerts if they choose to.
Burner phone still tracks the person everywhere. Yeah it’s hard. Too bad 1-way pagers are near extinct now.
The evidence that there is compromised data comes from screenshots on Reddit that are claimed to be of a chatroom where someone is posting something that looks like personal data which contains information that the site says they do not collect. This isn’t exactly a smoking gun.
Given that they are the target of a cyber attack, likely one that is politically motivated, I would assume that the attackers are not above spreading disinformation on social media.
Yeah I would bet the people hosting the StopICE website knew very well they would be the target of all kinds of attacks.
That doesn’t make them cybersecurity experts but I wouldn’t be surprised they would have put multiple layers of protection on the site.
Especially when tracking ICE agents you wouldn’t want the people reporting their position to also be trackable…