August 07, 2006
Lieberman Campaign Website Hacked?
At www.joe2006.com, the following message appears:
"This Account Is Under Construction"
According to Lieberman's campaign communications director, Marion Steinfels, "Yep, we've been hacked."
"There's a coordinated effort to overloaded our bandwith and that has brought down our website and our e-mail," she said. The attack began around mid-morning, she said.
Steinfels said the company that hosts the campaign website is investigating. It's the third time the site was broken into; it's the second time within a month.
Lieberman opponents might suggest that the Lieberman campaign forgot to pay its bill; Steinfels says that's totally untrue. Or that the campaign is responsible for adding content that crashed the site. But the campaign didn't add any significant new content.
There's no evidence at all that anyone associated with challenger Ned Lamont 's campaign had anything to do with the mischief.
One theory we'll throw out: the site has been hacked to make it appear as if the Lieberman campaign, running against the Netroots' candidate, forgot to pay its website bill. On the eve of the election. That's a theory.
If the Lieberman campaign did forget to pay its bills... well, it's a major ninth inning error.
Posted at 07:00 PM
Comments
They must be switching everything over to the "Connecticut for Lieberman" "Party". How about a quote, Senator?
"Over the years, I have never failed to advance the goals of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party."
Thomas Allen | 08.07.06 08:10 PM
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The nutroots strikes again. Can't win fairly, so they brought down the campaign website with the digital equivalent of plastique.
Fletcher | 08.07.06 08:21 PM
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In fairness, it could also be attempt to make it appear as if the site was hacked by Lamont forces.
Byron | 08.07.06 08:25 PM
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Third theory: they may have just taken the site offline for some unfortunate emergency maintenance.
It doesn't seem to be under attack, since you can reach the site. It's just that at 8:19pm EDT, a user is being shown a "Senator Lieberman's Campaign Website - Offline" page.
joy | 08.07.06 08:25 PM
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When you buy server space you set up an autobilling account, you also go with a site that automatically increases it's billing in accordance with its traffic. In other words, you don't lose your site because you don't pay for it, that's laughable and ludicrous.
Sites don't crash nowadays unless they ARE hacked in such huge deliberate volume that it overloads the server(s). It can't be expected to crash with normal surges of curiousity, though large at this time, it has to be done by deliberate design.
It's criminal, can be prosecuted through conspiracy, and interferes with a federal election process. It's a federal crime.
Tigger | 08.07.06 08:30 PM
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Karl Rove, evil genius that he is, had the site hacked by unnamed operatives to implicate the Lamont campaign, thereby adding Lieberman.
OK, that's nonsense, but it will be in a diary on Kos before sunrise!
Trudger | 08.07.06 11:31 PM
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Tigger is absolutely right. It is an interference with an election,and it is a bald face disregard for the Lieberman campaign's freedom of speech leading up to the election. For anyone who would consider themselves an advocate of free speech and democracy it is a slap in the face.
Jersey Dave | 08.08.06 12:00 AM
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You can still pull images from the site. (see http://www.joe2006.com/images/stories/lieberman-clinton.jpg) So there are no bandwith issues and nothing has been removed. Furthermore, the //templates/flash directory was left open (see http://www.joe2006.com//templates/flash/). Also, in there you can see that two files were changed today nav.swf, and video.swf (you can watch the video as well). If this was a hack, then those files would be gone. Someone in Lieberman campaign was updating the site and screwed up. The big question is why they aren't fixing the problem.
Flappy | 08.08.06 12:07 AM
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The idea that Lamont would bother is laughable. The idea that misguided Lamont supporters would is inevitable, because it's more than plausible. The idea that Joe would do this to himself to smear Lamont is, if not laughable, still silly.
We're 230 years old. Can't we just have a grown-up election?
Phil | 08.08.06 12:26 AM
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Heavy traffic. Just heavy, heavy traffic. Not surprising since this is the beginning of The Grand Radicalization of the two-party system. Or call it the maturing of democracy in general. Like it or not, America is headed for a coalition party system.
Phillip | 08.08.06 12:26 AM
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I read this on Connecticutblog:
"This isn't the first time they haven't paid their bills, it happened when the stupid bear-cub ad ran and Sean Smith bragged all the traffic (from people mocking the ad) crashed their site. Same notice."
Karen | 08.08.06 08:29 AM
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I think it's overload. The company is never going to be willing to admit that their servers crashed with overuse. I am a systems admin, worked for a hosting co. We had a lot of downtime.
Could be a DOS attack on the company that hosts his servers.
Whatever the case, if Joe doesn't win today, the Republicans are going to finally have a CT senator.
jay | 08.08.06 09:53 AM
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Why do you avoid what it probably the most likely answer: independent action by one or more anti-Lieberman activists. The power of the Internet is that it only takes one person to do this; there is no need for a coordinated effort by the Lamont team. I am sure, however, Lamont is thanking his lucky stars that whoever did this had the good sense not to plaster the site with "Vote for Ned" banners.
submandave | 08.08.06 09:59 AM
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It does not look like a hack at all. Easily fixable error. Why have they not fixed it? Seems like the staff is trying to get as much mileage out of their screwup as possible.
Hugh | 08.08.06 10:08 AM
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A guy in New Hampshire got convicted of civil rights offenses for jamming up phone lines of a "Get out the Vote" effort of one political party on electon day. Essentially a DoS attack on phones.
This probably could be considered a similar crime. Unfortunatly, internet attacks are probably harder to track back.
Shawn Levasseur | 08.08.06 10:36 AM
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www.joe2006.com now displays this text:
UPDATE ON THE ATTACK ON THE LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE
STATEMENT FROM SEAN SMITH: "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."
"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."
Mark Higuera | 08.08.06 01:13 PM
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Who would benefit from the site being down?
Only Lieberman.
He can get huffy and try to get sympathy votes and cast aspersions on Lamont and his camp.
Lamont wants nothing at all to happen except to get out his vote.
Long time politicians are very aware of this tactic.
marybishop | 08.08.06 01:45 PM
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Its not up right now.
spacemonkey | 08.08.06 02:22 PM
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Now it's all gone. Good catch on the other pages that were up. This could just be a second rate ISP that wasn't prepared for a huge surge last night and today. I tried to go on earlier last night from Milwaukee, no problems, but I'm sure I wasn't the only one...not even a race near my home. As I've found out from my blog, hits come from the entire world and sometimes en masse if you have an interesting story. This was a campaign that was not ready technologically for the big day and now the campaign manager is covering his tracks for his ineptitude with the Net by blaming it on hackers.
He's already incoherently backtracking on the accusations and he should... The only effect this could have on the campaign would be to show that Lieberman is truly inept when it comes to online campaigning. There's a word that would have dealt with the entire problem the last time the server crashed and we wouldn't be having this discussion... Redundancy.
Rae | 08.08.06 02:58 PM
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http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/08/08/lieberman-got-what-he-paid-for/
He's hosting the site on a shared server paying $15 for 10 GB of monthly bandwidth. The blame is squarely on his technical team.
JW | 08.08.06 05:08 PM
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It seems to me that they chose the wrong ISP, and it cannot keep up with the bandwidth needs. For such a high profile government job, you need to expect huge amounts of denial of service and web hits. Regardless if they are legit or not, this is not hacking, it is poor bandwidth planning.
You better get an ISP like SAVVIS, NTT/VERIO, IBM, or other large hosting company. There are so many now which can suppor huge bandwidth needs, and block denial of service attacks.
rhawk301 | 08.08.06 06:15 PM
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oh please does anyone really expect that Lieberman's website went down suddenly as he was surging and closing the gap on Lamont? Someone did this deliberately and if it was a misguided Lamont supporter or someone who would put Senator Lieberman in black face it should have never happened. Oh and can someone tell Sharpton and Jackson what a "close friend" of Lamont's did?
bob | 08.08.06 11:32 PM
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I actually work with servers via websites. I cant believe anyone would suggest that the site closed because someone didn’t pay their bills. That is ridiculous, just typical liberal nonsense encouraged by radical leftist mainstream media. Some other Lemont supporter here said that some files were working before...therefore someone screwed up in Lieberman’s campaign party. Whoever said that has no clue what he is talking about. When you hack a server, not all files will just “disappear“. The server is confused and all but on certain files (mostly small files like videos and pictures) it will still manage to come up. Now, if you go to those links, they don’t even work. Tells you that people are working on the server.
This is clearly an act of some radical liberal(s) who supports Lemont's radical ideals. I would like to see a trail for this and a revote. This just tells you how far a radical liberal will go. They clearly don’t do any good in a great country like this. All they do is go to the corner and wine about current issues without using any suggestion on how to fix. As we can clearly see from this website being hacked.. I hope Lieberman will win this election and not some nut like Lemont who wont do jack in office.
ry18 | 08.09.06 06:44 PM
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http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/08/08/lieberman-got-what-he-paid-for/
Ok, JW that site is a fraud itself. If you have any brains you would realize that when you hack a server these days, you have to hack the entire thing. Even if Liberman has his server hosted there it means that the hackers had to hack the entire system. That is the reason why this companies server is down. Before you put down fraud sites with no respect. At least know what they are talking about.
Ryan | 08.09.06 06:53 PM
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It's STILL down?
What site hacked by a denial of service attack stays down for TWO DAYS?
Denial of service attacks don't last TWO DAYS, and when that problem is fixed, you restore the site from backup and it's up again.
TWO DAYS? Do they realize how long that is in internet time and how incompetent that makes them look?
What Huh | 08.10.06 01:48 AM
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I blame Fox News.
Zuma Hans | 08.10.06 05:49 PM
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