Rival campaign had been blamed for outage
Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 campaign Web site wasn't victimized by dirty tricks, as he charged at the time, but crashed the day before Connecticut's Democratic primary because the server was poorly run, according to an FBI memo obtained The Advocate, a daily newspaper in Stamford, Conn.

The paper obtained the October 2006 FBI investigative report using the Freedom of Information Act, and published excerpts from it yesterday.

Lieberman had accused supporters of his primary opponent, Ned Lamont, with launching a denial-of-service attack against the Joe2006.com Web site in early August 2006, one day before the primary. Lamont won the Democratic primary but later lost in a three-way race to Lieberman, who is now an Independent senator for Connecticut.

A former spokesman for the Lieberman campaign said in late 2006 that the campaign's Web consultant had confirmed that the site was attacked.

The FBI said otherwise, according to The Advocate. "The server that hosted the Joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of [an] attack," the FBI's office in New Haven, Conn., said in documents obtained by the newspaper.

"The systems administrator misinterpreted the root cause," those documents continued. "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 Corp.'s security response group, said he was surprised that the server administrator for Lieberman's Web site couldn't tell the difference between a breakdown and an attack. "It shouldn't be that difficult," said Friedrichs, when asked how tough it would have been to properly place responsibility for the site's problems. "They should have been able to analyze the [server] logs," he said, adding that that would have been smart "before jumping to a conclusion."

During the outage, visitors were greeted with a message from the Lieberman campaign that called on Lamont to "issue an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately."

Friedrichs, who has published extensively on Web threats against political candidates and sites, said the brouhaha shows that this is uncharted territory. "This is an entirely new landscape, and although there's the potential for attack, we have to be careful of what we do and say."
Compworld