A Thousand Cups of Tea

Hackerz have taken down Joe Lierberman’s website!!

Um, briefly- if the Lieberman campaign had ponied up for a decent webhost, this would be a non-issue. If they had implemented some better security after the site got cracked before, this would be a non-issue. And, finally, if Lieberman weren’t losing the primary, this would be a non-issue.

It’s a distraction. I feel EXTREMELY confident, even without having any inside knowledge of the machinations of the Lamont campaign, that this is some unrelated third party, probably some script kiddie having a little fun. Professional web consultants know better than to host mission-critical sites at providers that don’t have the means to deflect an amateurish DDoS attack. The Lieberman campaign has a guy named Dan Geary walking around to the media on this- he identifies himself as Lieberman’s internet consultant. He should have been fired after the first incident.

In the meantime, the Official Ned Lamont campaign position that I would propose:

“Blaming Ned Lamont for hacking Joe Lieberman’s website is like blaming one’s ex-wife when one gets mugged.”

In other words, just because you don’t like someone doesn’t mean that they’re responsible for everything that goes wrong in your life. There are a lot of people who don’t like Joe Lieberman. They don’t all work for Ned Lamont.

::UPDATE::

There’s a significantly more comprehensive takedown here.

Here what might have happened:
a. Web traffic spikes as national focus on the campaign grows
b. Based on (2b) above, if the webserver is throttled by traffic (due to actual traffic or poor response tuning or an attack or a combination of the three), this would also affect mail delivery to joe2006.com. It could also affect outbound mail if users on that domain use that address for SMTP service.
c. The server is most likely a shared one, since the name, server1.myhostcamp.com, implies lots of other hosts live on it.

It’s a shame that they’re bothering the United States Attorney’s Office with this. It looks like it’s probably pure incompetence.