Rotophonic

A geeky blog discussing the world of music, technology & politics.

Archive for category Joe Lieberman

Day 612: Lieberman Website “Hacked” By His Campaign’s Idiocy

Apr 14

Posted by rotophonic in Joe Lieberman, Politics, Technology | 1 Comment

Really? I accused another campaign of something it didn’t do?

Only 612 days after Joe Lieberman’s Joe2006.com web site crashed and burned, causing his campaign to claim the vicious bloggers at DailyKos.com and Ned Lamont’s campaign had hacked into poor Joe’s server and broken it, we now learn through a Freedom of Information Act request that the FBI long ago determined that his server simply crashed. It was never hacked. It was never subject to a Denial of Service attack. The server administrators had a mis-configured server on their hands. The Joomla! hacker never defaced the site.

Where’s the apology, Joe? Obviously those in the Lieberman campaign were aware of this finding a long time ago (the FBI email obtained by the AP was sent in October 2006) but details on the outcome of the investigation were never released. Seems like some political hackery was up. This information might have been useful to the voters in November 2006.

“Senator Lieberman’s campaign team accused an awful lot of good people of breaking the law on the eve of the primary, and they did it for political purposes,” Lamont told the AP in a telephone interview. “If he does the right thing, he’ll stand up and say, ‘I was wrong.”

We’ll never know how much this incident influenced the voters of Connecticut when they all got “hepped-up” on Joementum and put this idiot back in the Senate, but it certainly could come back to haunt him if he tries shacking up with McBush for the general election.

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Joe Lieberman Hates Blogs

Apr 30

Posted by rotophonic in Blog Haters, Joe Lieberman, Politics | No Comments

Joe SadSpeaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Lieberman took time out from his new life as a pseudo-Republican hypocrite to complain that, along with attack ads, talk-radio, and CNN harming American Politics,

bloggers have added another dimension of vituperation toxicity

Well… I’m not exactly sure what you mean by putting those two nouns together–vituperation toxicity–but if that means that bloggers are an extra set of eyes calling out your terrible record of supporting Bush’s war in Iraq or the false charge that Ned Lamont’s campaign hacked your web site…then I’m happy about it.

Get the whole transcript and video at [Think Progress]

Day 17 in the Hunt for the Lieberman Hacker – Hacker already found

Aug 23

Posted by rotophonic in Joe Lieberman, Politics, Technology | No Comments

Joe2006I’m not sure what they’re investigating, but the FBI probably isn’t looking too hard for the person who defaced Lieberman’s website. The hacker has already been found.

Zone-h.org spoke on August 10th with a Turkish hacker who admitted to defacing Lieberman’s site. Was this Turkish hacker working for Ned Lamont? Had he been enlisted by legions of bloggers to ruin Lieberman’s chances? Not even close. Here’s what Roberto Preatoni discovered:

We tried to contact the attacker who disclosed that he indeed attacked Senator Joe Lieberman’s website and defaced it, but being a Turkish guy, he really didn’t have a clue about who Senator Joe Lieberman was. Being Muslim we asked him if his attack was anyway politically motivated and the answer was: “I did it just for fun”.

Being also asked if he was the coordinator of the Denial of Service attacks which have been effecting Senator Joe Lieberman’s site he declared that what he did was just to deface the site, then moving to the next target. ”

Did you get that last bit? The hacker admitted to defacing the site, but simply moved on to the next vulnerable site in his list. As I reported before, this was no Denial of Service attack.

I can vouch for the risks that unpatched sites running Joomla! run. After an automated scan of my server’s pages on August 20th looking for mentions of Joomla! and the ext_calendar module (both terms would be found in that article), a computer based in Turkey attempted to load a hack onto my system. Fortunately, I’m not running Joomla!, and it certainly backs up the story that this was simply a random incident and Lieberman’s site was defaced along with probably hundreds or thousands of others that day.

Day 11 in the hunt for the real Lieberman website hacker

Aug 18

Posted by rotophonic in Joe Lieberman, Politics, Technology | No Comments

Joe SadAs the blogosphere calms down after just over a week of frenzied investigation into the real cause of Lieberman’s website woes, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s any investigation at all. While the Lieberman campaign asked the FBI and the Connecticut Attorney General’s office to investigate the failure of their site on Election Day, sufficient questions have been raised as to the veracity of their claims that I expect they might want to rescind those requests.

As Rotophonic.com and TPMmuckraker reported last week, the Lieberman campaign’s ability to reach its supporters had not been completely disrupted, as they originally claimed. And the questions (here and here) about the robustness of their web hosting and the wisdom of their technical staff will surely color the investigation. I definitely know the FBI won’t appreciate being pulled off counter-terrorism detail to investigate the failure of Lieberman’s staff to adequately build, operate and manage its own website.

Rotophonic.com and David Sirota at The Huffington Post haven’t forgotten about the story and eagerly await the publication of any new details about Lieberman’s website failure and an explanation for what really happened.

Ratchet up the fear factor…It’s Election Season

Aug 14

Posted by rotophonic in Joe Lieberman, Politics | No Comments

I must admit that when I heard that the United Kingdom had arrested over 20 people involved in a terrorist plot on the day after pro-war Lieberman had gone down to defeat in the Connecticut primary election, I was particularly cynical. I can’t ever forget the multiple increases in the United States threat level as the 2004 Presidential Election approached…most of which never really amounted to anything, but served well to remind those in North Dakota how afraid of a terrorist attack they should be.

So this morning in my daily perusal of TPMmuckraker, I was not surprised to read this story pointing to a MSNBC report that the Bush Administration rushed the arrest of suspects in the British terror plot. In particular was this quote from the original MSNBC article,

the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports

Strangely, the MSNBC reporters attribute America’s eagerness to arrest the subjects with this rationale:

Analysts say that in recent years, American security officials have become edgier than the British in such cases because of missed opportunities leading up to 9/11.

Edgier than the British? Really? Do the reporters writing this story actually believe that some egghead analyst in the CIA actually convinced the White House to lean on Tony Blair to arrest the terror cell? The nerds in CIA live in the reality-based world and the White House lives in its ideological dream world where Iraq continues to go according to plan, the people of the Middle East see us as glorious liberators, the weapons of mass destruction were found and the American public sees Bush’s condescending smirk as a cute mannerism.

Should we believe that a very complex, passionate argument had been going on between various departments in the U.S. Government over the last few weeks, resulting in the suggestion that the British make arrests now versus later? Or should we use Ockham’s Razor cut through the crap and determine that Bush/Rove thought the timing would be better on Wednesday to blunt the effect of Lieberman’s embarrassing loss?

Don’t forget the Bush aide who said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Lieberman Campaign Lied: Email Blast Capability Fully Functional

Aug 11

Posted by rotophonic in Joe Lieberman, Politics, Technology | No Comments

BustedThis morning Justin Rood of TPMmuckraker reported that Lieberman’s campaign had sent an email to their supporters early on Tuesday morning announcing the Lieberman Victory Party. Upon reviewing the headers of this email, I noted that the source of this email was a server used by an email marketing company–Blue Hornet.

When I was doing research for my earlier story on the reasons for Lieberman’s ‘hacked’ site woes, I noticed, in reviewing the cached pages of Joe2006.com in Google for references to Joomla! modules, that the web forms, like the “Newsletter Signup Form”, included on the home page of the Joe2006.com website were not being submitted to Joe2006.com, but to another company…Blue Hornet. Blue Hornet clearly handled all the heavy lifting involved with the collection of email addresses for Lieberman and the management of their mass-email communications.

When the email was delivered to Lieberman supporters early on Election Day, those emails originated from Blue Hornet. As such, the Lieberman campaign had mass-emailing capabilities not only in the morning of Election Day, but also continued to have this capability throughout the day. And they still do!

This statement by Sean Smith, in public as well as on the web page posted on Joe2006.com for days, was demonstrably false:

email has been totally disrupted and disabled” – Sean Smith

I guess he shouldn’t have used the word totally.

Did a member of Lieberman’s staff specifically prohibit the use of Blue Hornet’s services after their website was taken offline? It’s puzzling that Sean Smith was speaking to reporters about how the downing of their web server had suppressed “voter participation and undermine[d] the voting process on Election Day”, while the Lieberman campaign continued to have all its capability to “get out the vote” through email blasts. Discovering this, I’m actually happy the Feds are investigating.