August 10, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Senator Joe Lieberman’s campaign Web site Joe2006.com (joe2006.com) was forced to go offline early on Tuesday as the site was overwhelmed by traffic generated by hackers, according to a report by MSNBC.
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The Joe2006.com Web site was reportedly hosted on a server housed by hosting provider The Planet, on a server that also hosts about 70 other Web sites. Many of those sites were also hard to reach on Tuesday. Visitors to the Lieberman site were redirected to a page on the domain MyHostCamp.com, which was also hosted on ThePlanet.com.
Dan Geary, operator of Lieberman's site, says Tuesday's attack was the third in the past month. He says the earlier two attacks involved defacements where the hacker altered content on Lieberman's home page. Geary says this time the attackers flooded the site with requests, probably by directing an army of hacked computers at the site.
Geary reportedly would not offer specifics about the kind of traffic the site was receiving or where it was coming from, other than to say it involved multiple requests for Web pages, FTP files and emails.
The Web site troubles also affected campaign worker emails, forcing them to communicate using personal accounts. MSNBC says Lieberman's Web site quickly became a political issue on Tuesday, the day of the hotly contested Connecticut Democratic party primary vote, when Lieberman’s campaign manager accused political opponent Ned Lamont’s office of orchestrating the cyber attack. Lamont quickly denied any involvement.
Some critics have suggested the real reason the site went down was because Lieberman failed to pay his Internet hosting bills or didn't think far enough ahead to buy enough bandwidth to handle election-day traffic.
Geary responded by saying the campaign had a very robust hosting solution, and was paying for more than enough bandwidth to support campaign efforts.
