Update on Lieberman's Website.
Further reading of blogs on the matter of the alleged attack on the Lieberman website has me backing off on earlier claims of a DOS (Denial of Service) attack on the Lieberman website.
It is not in dispute by anyone discussing the matter that the hosting service Lieberman's team was using was cheaper than the one I use for my hosting. I find that incredible given the stature of this race, Lieberman's team should have known they needed a higher level service. Not only is it a statewide race but the eyes of the nation and to a certain extent the world were on this one.
What is in dispute? Whether the outage of the webpages was due to malice or a flood of visitors. Also, the claim by Kos that the Lieberman team did not pay their bills and got shut down on account of that. The (non-payment) claim by Kos is ludicrous it doesn't take 18 hours to fix that. OTOH, a well organized and sustained DOS attack is capable of taking down servers for extended periods of time. Example Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom which spent quite a bit of time down due to a DOS attack.
Of course, it is also a reasonable hypothesis that being election day for a statewide race (especially one with the national attention this one has) that the cheap hosting service procured by the Lieberman campaign could not hack the load. Even the biggest of them get slowed down due to traffic floods, e.g. Little Green Footballs was very slow due to the traffic to the Reuters fauxtography story.
What do we need to determine the true nature of this event? Server logs and the like, information not likely to be divulged. However, the Lieberman campaign stated publicly it filed complaints with law enforcement authorities this tells me those logs are pointing at maliciousness. The pity is the only conclusion that will be accepted by the Krazy Kos Kiddies (KKKs) is a natural (and unexpected) surge in traffic, if those logs point to villianry the KKKs will (and are) say the site was a honeypot setup to smear them and their candidate, no doubt setup by Karl Rove.
It is not in dispute by anyone discussing the matter that the hosting service Lieberman's team was using was cheaper than the one I use for my hosting. I find that incredible given the stature of this race, Lieberman's team should have known they needed a higher level service. Not only is it a statewide race but the eyes of the nation and to a certain extent the world were on this one.
What is in dispute? Whether the outage of the webpages was due to malice or a flood of visitors. Also, the claim by Kos that the Lieberman team did not pay their bills and got shut down on account of that. The (non-payment) claim by Kos is ludicrous it doesn't take 18 hours to fix that. OTOH, a well organized and sustained DOS attack is capable of taking down servers for extended periods of time. Example Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom which spent quite a bit of time down due to a DOS attack.
Of course, it is also a reasonable hypothesis that being election day for a statewide race (especially one with the national attention this one has) that the cheap hosting service procured by the Lieberman campaign could not hack the load. Even the biggest of them get slowed down due to traffic floods, e.g. Little Green Footballs was very slow due to the traffic to the Reuters fauxtography story.
What do we need to determine the true nature of this event? Server logs and the like, information not likely to be divulged. However, the Lieberman campaign stated publicly it filed complaints with law enforcement authorities this tells me those logs are pointing at maliciousness. The pity is the only conclusion that will be accepted by the Krazy Kos Kiddies (KKKs) is a natural (and unexpected) surge in traffic, if those logs point to villianry the KKKs will (and are) say the site was a honeypot setup to smear them and their candidate, no doubt setup by Karl Rove.
posted by Marcus Aurelius at 10:28 PM
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