The Leiberman "Hack" Bogus? - Democratic Underground

blogslut

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Tue Aug-08-06 02:04 PM
Original message

The Leiberman "Hack" Bogus?

Edited on Tue Aug-08-06 02:08 PM by blogslut

Probably.

According to Steve Gilliard, a Lieberman rep named Dan Gerstein is claiming that Joe's election website has been hacked. As per Mr. Gilliard's blog:

"Several bloggers and readers here have noted that www.joe2006.com, the Lieberman campaign blog was offline for hours with the message, “This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.”

The senator’s aides blamed the shutdown on liberal bloggers and other opponents. “They hate Bush but they use the same tactics as the Bush campaign,” said Dan Gerstein, a Lieberman adviser, referring to the bloggers..."

Gilliard then posts a bit from Justin Rood of TPMCafe In his piece, Mr. Rood displays a copy of an email from a "Dan Geary" - who is apparently the website administrator of Lieberman's site.

"...This note is to confirm that the suspension of displaying the website www.joe2006.com: was not due to to an overdue account. Friends of Joe Lieberman is completely paid in full. The screen that showed yesterday is a default image from the server. In order to isolate where the denial of service attack was coming into the site, we disabled it as rapidly as possible. Once we were able to isolate all the site files for study we were able to add an appropriate one-page maintenance message.

Your campaign has in fact paid every invoice submitted to it within a week and a half.

Regards,

Dan Geary"

LINK to Gilliard: http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/08/pinocchio-gerstein.html

Here's the skinny. Lieberman's site went down. The default message that originally appeared was assumed by some to be the default message one sees when a hosting client has not paid their bill. Still others claim that the site went down because they went over their bandwidth limit. The Lieberman camp claim that the site was subject to a Denial Of Service attack - meaning that the site was so flooded with requests, it shut down. The Lieberman camp is blaming Lamont supporters.

Being a webmaster, I researched this story from a webmaster's perspective. I did a WHOIS lookup on www.joe2006.com. When I did this, I discovered some interesting things about Joe's site. First off, Joe is hosting his site on a shared server. That means his site is on the same server as 73 other websites. Another thing I discovered is that Joe hasn't locked his domain. When you don't lock your domain, you take the chance that it can be hijacked. This is irresponsible website administration at best.

According to the WHOIS: http://whois.domaintools.com/joe2006.com

The Lieberman site is on the Domain Name Server NS1.THEPLANET.COM. This is the DNS server for a datacenter named ThePlanet. Note that I said DATACENTER. ThePlanet is not a host. ThePlanet owns racks. Racks that individuals can rent. This means that whoever is "hosting" Lieberman's site is either a hosting re-seller or owns their own server that they co-locate at ThePlanet.

I called ThePlanet and spoke to a very nice Tech guy named John. John confirmed my theory. Whoever owns the server is totally responsible for the administration of that server. Even if all 74 sites on the server were attackd, ThePlanet would know nothing about it- it's not their responsibility. I pushed John but he refused to give me the name of the re-seller or individual that owns that server.

What does this all mean? It means that whoever is in control of that server knows exactly whether or not it was subject to a DoS attack. Being that the server is a virtual one - sharing space with 73 other sites, it would be natural to assume that if the server was attacked all 74 sites would be down. As of this moment, the ones I checked were totally online and operational.

My question is: Who is the hosting company for joe2006.com? Who is the site administrator? If it is this Dan Geary person mentioned by Gilliard, he's not a very good administrator. From what I have Googled, Dan Geary is a consultant for companies like Hyatt Hotels, Trump Hotels and Paramount Amusement Park:

"Dan Geary is a private-public policy consultant on environmental, public health, and consumer law issues. He and his organization have worked to institute equal opportunities for the developers and end-users of clean, renewable energy. Additionally, as the Nevada representative to the National Environmental Trust, Mr. Geary works with the nonprofit group to promote sound environmental policies, encourage conservation, and transform polluting industries.

Mr. Geary's career in public policy began as an aide to former U.S. Representative James H. Bilbray. Since that time, he has been a campaign consultant for a variety of federal, state, and local elected officials and, in 1994, was the Clark County campaign manager for U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey's presidential campaign. Mr. Geary also co-founded Nevadans for Medical Rights, an organization that spearheaded changes to the state’s constitution regarding marijuana for the terminally ill. Dan Geary co-owns the Geary Company Advertising Agency in Las Vegas and Geary Interactive, a San Diego-based Internet development and marketing firm..."
http://www.nevadarenewables.org/?section=members&id=349
http://www.gearycompany.com/company.html

My guess? Joe Lieberman's people don't know anything about how to host a website properly. You don't launch a Senate campaign on a shared, re-seller's server. You don't neglect to lock your domain. You don't go accusing people of DoS attacks without proof.