Lieberman Camp Takes Denial Of Service Attack To Law Enforcement
Be careful what you wish for. From the “What, DOS attack? Who ever heard of that?” Kos:
The Lieberman campaign is on a whine attack, claiming the Lamont people “hacked” their site.
If they did, get the FBI on it and the guilty parties should be charged and tried.
Sen. Joe Lieberman’s campaign plans to ask federal officials to investigate what they call a the “disabling” attack on their campaign website. Sean Smith, posted a statement on the Joe2006 site today.
“For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman’s website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State’s Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review,”
Smith wrote.
One reason an attack may have real consequences: the Lieberman campaign can’t communicate via e-mail with their field offices and can’t efficiently monitor their field program.
An official with the company that administers Lieberman’s campaign website confirms that the service outage was not caused by an unpayment of bills.
Does that change Markos’s opinion? Not in the least:
Two posts down it’s clear that Lieberman’s website isn’t suffering from a Denial of Service attack.
But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman’s site went down.
They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.
Here’s the deal — you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn’t need that much bandwidth, but if you’re paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin’ cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don’t go blaming your opponent when your shi**y service goes out.
Wow, that is definitive! I guess the law enforcement officials can close up shop; never fear, Markos, who just can’t understand why Lieberman’s site would be down, has saved us all from investigating.
Denial Of Service, Markos – you know it, I know it, the world knows it…
I’ve seen some posts from both sides of the issue that leave it quite open, to me, what’s going on. Mostly, though, what makes me think that Lamont’s campaign didn’t have anything to do with it is that it would be too mind-numbingly stupid to comprehend.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/8/8/141421/9441
I don’t necessarily think it’s Lamont’s campaign – or even Kos Kidz – but it seems awfully convenient for Lieberman to have technical problems today of all days, does it not?
DOS makes the most sense – some progressive nutjob hacker, would be my guess.
I’ve seen the mydd post, though, and you’re right, some are saying this is technical, as Markos does – we’ll see. But just as it would be really stupid for Lamont to do something like this (almost as stupid as saying he ‘knows nothing’ about the blogs – whoops! He did that, didn’t he?), it would be really stupid for the Lieberman camp to go to law enforcement with a technical glitch, wouldn’t it?
Ah, well, time will tell, I suppose…
I don’t think it was Lamont coordinated at all, but I do think it is an over-zealous undisciplined member of the nutroots.
I certainly don’t discount that possibility. I only say that I’ve seen enough to make me, in my technological ignorance, doubt that it’s necessarily as clear-cut as an attack on the site. I’m not asserting that it wasn’t, only saying that I’m not sure.
Other sites are saying there were two separate attacks.
I’ll go along with TS9 on the lone gunman theory, perhaps with one additional nut up on the grassy knoll.
A bandwidth limit of 10 GB ??
That’s pathetic.
Even if the entire MyHostCamp server weren’t down (for whatever reason), you’d expect them to run out of their 10 GB allotment before election day.
Perhaps it’s a little late, but maybe they should talk to Ted Stevens and ask for a bigger tube.
Jacques, two points: one, we only have Kos’s word that there’s a 10G limit (I’m sure, like most hosting services, they allow more bandwidth for an extra fee). The Lieberman camp has said they pay more than $15 a month.
Two: yeah, it does seem like Lieberman needs to get rid of his Internet folks, pronto (if it’s not too late – i.e., if he runs as an Independent or somehow pulls this out). Even if it was a DOS attack, they should have been prepared for that eventuality, I would think…
No, they don’t seem particularly on-the-ball:
And Kos now reports:
DoS attacks don’t affect particular accounts on a server. They bring down the whole server. The attack site is up, their campaign site is down. This isn’t a DoS attack.
which certainly dovetails nicely with the “used up their bandwidth allotment” explanation.
As does the URL the Lieberman page redirects to:
http://server1.myhostcamp.com/suspended.page/
Well, maybe so…as I said before, if it is a bandwidth problem, I’ll admit my hunch was wrong – but man, if that’s so, then the Lieberman camp is really, really gonna have egg on their face.
But if it was, don’t you think they would just pay the bill and bring it up to date? Their host says it has nothing to do with billing…