Incompetence or subtle hacking?

Joe Lieberman's Web site was offline this evening, the primary is tommorow.



One explanation is that the site ran out of money as the page suggests. Another is that the site was hacked by someone who realized that failing to pay the bills is a worse comment on a political campagin than having a vulnerable Web site.

Update: The Lieberman campaign claims that it was 'hacked' through an organized downloading campaign that apparently caused the site to overrun their paid bandwidth allotment. This sounds more like a large traffic spike than the sort of SYN flood DDoS that is used by hackers. Absent actual proof of collusion it is not easy to know whether the claim is credible or not. One would expect an upturn in traffic just before the election day.

Either way it suggests that hosting campaign sites is going to be an interesting challenge in November. Regardless of whether this was incompetence or an actual attack the next one will be deliberate and the one after that and the hundred after that.