My company's servers live in the same building as Lieberman's, at
The Planet in Dallas -- or, at least this was true before they moved their hosting to another company this afternoon. (Traceroute to
southpaw.goodshow.net, my blog, if you wish to confirm for yourself my business relationship with the provider in question.) The Planet is a full service hosting and collocation company, with a Network Operations Center staffed 24/7/365. Among their many services, they offer
intrusion detection and response.
What does it take to get their security team to respond to an attack? A phone call. That's it.
(More below the fold.)
So the chain of events is supposed to be this:
1. Hackers decide to take joe2006.com offline on Election Day.
2. Apparently the Lieberman team checks with their provider, MyHostCamp, who supposedly tells them they have been hacked or DoS attacked (not clear which, the stories are all over the place).
3. MyHostCamp evidently does not followup with the Planet, thus allowing perhaps their most visible customer to be down for hours on the most critical day imaginable (from a PR perspective).
4. Meanwhile, the implied offenders, the Lamont campaign, have a site on the same IP address that is completely unaffected.
Bottom line: if this was a security incident, why was the Planet's security team not engaged to restore service? And why did Lamont's site stay up throughout?
Conclusion: This wasn't a security incident at all.
UPDATE: The Lamont site referenced above is actually an anti-Lamont site apparently set up by folks associated with Lieberman. Nevertheless, it was up all day.
UPDATE 2: In comments it was noted that my assertion about MyHostCamp's lack of response wasn't well supported. What I should have said in the first place was that my own experience with the Planet's security response team and NOC has been very good. My belief is that, had this been a security incident, their staff would have had service restored within 30 minutes. That the service was down for 18 hours is evidence that the Planet was never engaged in this way.