So was the Lieberman campaign website actually hacked? Or are they just cheap?
Lieberman’s internet consultant Dan Geary, who oversees Joe2006.com, says he’s still sure that their site suffered a “malicious attack.” But when pressed, he said that they weren’t sure that it was a “Denial of Service” attack, as he’d said earlier. He didn’t have any more information about the nature of the supposed attack. “I’ve spent 99% of my time speaking [to reporters] about the story,” he said.
He also denied that the site was down because of their webhost. Over at DailyKos, Markos reported that the campaign has an agreement with a webhost service called MyHostCamp, for which the campaign pays $15/month. All MyHostCamp sites are down, Markos reported, seeming to indicate that the problem was not caused by a hacker but Lieberman’s host company being unable to handle a surge in authentic traffic.
But Geary insisted that the host company was fine. “When we take the site down, the server is fine… [It’s] not the hosting, it’s not the bandwidth,” he said. Geary said that all of his company’s sites are on that server, and that it’s owned by someone he works with “all the time.”
He denied Markos’ report that the campaign paid only $15 a month for service. They pay a “bit more,” he said; he couldn’t say precisely how much, but said he’d have that information if I called back later.
Geary admitted the campaign’s technical staff wasn’t prepared to deal with a malicious intruder. “We have nobody with a security background helping with this,” Geary told me. “It’s just us, what we know, how we work with our server network.”
Earlier today, the Lamont campaign said in a statement, “If Senator Lieberman’s website was indeed hacked, we had absolutely no part in it, denounce the action, and urge whoever is responsible cease and desist immediately,” and offered their technical expertise and support to get the Joe2006.com site back up.
Geary, who’s based in Nevada, was unaware of the Lamont campaign’s offer of assistance.
Update: The Lamont campaign is now linking to a Google-cached version of the joe2006.com site.