Lieberman's Misconfigured Server Took It Offline — Not Opposition DoS Attacks

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the more-fun-to-blame-the-opposition dept

You may recall back in 2006, that every time a politician’s web server went down, they used it as an opportunity to blame the opposition for hacking their machine or sending a denial of service attack. Joe Lieberman got the most publicity for such a claim, with his staff very clearly claiming it was an opposition attack, while many others pointed out that it looked like Lieberman’s campaign was set up on a cheap hosting platform with very low bandwidth limits. Either way, the Lieberman campaign called in the Feds to see if they could track down the mysterious “attacker.” And, now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the FBI quickly concluded there was no attack. It was, as expected, a very poorly configured server. Even better, the same sysadmin who misconfigured the server then couldn’t figure out why the server went down, and so it was he who originally blamed a malicious attack as an explanation to cover up his own bad job.

Filed Under: blame, dos attack, fbi, joe lieberman, politics