Lieberman Site Failed, says FBI

• By theWHIR.com , April 10, 2008

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April 10, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Server problems were responsible for Senator Joseph Lieberman's 2006 campaign site crashing one day before Connecticut's Democratic primary, and not a denial-of-service attack as Lieberman had claimed at the time, according to an FBI memo obtained by The Advocate (stamfordadvocate.com).

The Stamford, Connecticut newspaper obtained the October 2006 FBI investigative report using the Freedom of Information Act, publishing excerpts from the memo yesterday.

Lieberman had blamed August 2006's Joe2006.com crash on supporters of his primary opponent, Ned Lamont, accusing them for launching a DDoS attack against the site. Lamont ended up winning the Democratic primary, only to later lose in a three-way race to Lieberman.

In late 2006, a former Lieberman campaign spokesman said that the campaign's Web consultant had confirmed that the website was attacked. However, according to the FBI memo attained by The Advocate, the site's server "failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured" and "there was no evidence of [an] attack."

The FBI document reads:

"The systems administrator misinterpreted the root cause. The systems administrator finally declared the server was being attacked, and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site. The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server."

Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec's security response group, says that there should have been no reason why the server administrator for Lieberman's site could not distinguish between a server breakdown and an attack. He says the administrator "should have been able to analyze the [server] logs."

During the outage, the website's homepage featured a message from the Lieberman campaign that demanded Lamont to "issue an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately."

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