Comments on: Top Five Things That Brought Down Lieberman’s Web Server

By: sandrar

sandrar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:49:42 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: usagi

usagi — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 08:03:35 +0000

One small correction, it’s “Joomla!” not “Joomla”. The exclaimation mark is part of the trademark.

By: Just an American Boy

Just an American Boy — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:43:21 +0000

Given that Joe fired his entire staff except two people (at least as far as reports suggest), his “tech guys” (and I use that term loosely) may have been fired as well.

By: rotophonic

rotophonic — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:06:09 +0000

Even if a hack of the Joomla system resulted in the server overloading itself, it still doesn’t explain the inept handling of the issue. The technical staff should have at least gotten Joe2006.com up on another server with whatever means necessary while they determined what happened on the first one. Load a backup version of the content or even a simple single page on the new one and they would have had their server live again within an hour or so.

The fact that they left the server down for two days during the peak of the election is either completely “amateur-night” IT or very cynical politicking (considering they accused their opponent and his supporters of causing this situation with no evidence to support the claim).

By: Daai Tou Laam Diary

Daai Tou Laam Diary — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:29:41 +0000

joe2006.com update…

So if you’re an American political junkie, you know that Joe Lieberman losts his primary campaign to Ned Lamont earlier this week. If you’re an extreme political junkie, you’ll be familiar with the tale of joe2006.com, though the tale keeps changing…

By: Tom - Daai Tou Laam

Tom - Daai Tou Laam — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:14:47 +0000

This interview with Hubbell by TPMmuckraker says it was something to do with a flood of email being generated internally by the server. That sounds to me like a spammer exploiting a misconfigured or poorly configured mailto form. If the form was munching the domain names supplied by the spammer and replacing them with joe2006.com, it would produce the results reported in the interview. The MX record for myhostcamp.com still points to the same IP that was the host for all of the websites, which seems to me as really small time. But if a spammer was exploiting the server to spam the internet via a mailto form, you'd get the double whammy of high server load from the web servers processing the forms to the high server load of the mail server processing all of the spam.

By: Just an American Boy

Just an American Boy — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:16:07 +0000

If a vulnerability in Joomla was exploited, software could have been installed to scan the net looking for additional hosts to compromise. Those behind the intrusion might not have even known what site they had exploited. If this is the case, the heavy traffic may have been outgoing rather than incoming. Joe’s site was probably a virtual machine and “taking it down” meant turning off the virtual machine.