Lieberman’s people are alternately claiming their site was hacked and that it was subject to a denial-of-service attack. But Skinner at Democratic Underground got this screenshot showing that at least for a time, they changed the “suspended” page on Lieberman’s site to a message on the “attack”–but now the “suspended” page is back to a generic message. This proves that Lieberman’s people had access to the server and can now control the page that appears–and they have changed it back to a generic page! Why the hell do that?

This post also explains why the Lieberman story doesn’t add up.

More weirdness: Lieberman’s site is on a shared server, without apparent backup. That is so stupid as to be unbelievable. Hell, I have a shared server to run this dinky little blog. Lieberman is running a senate campaign that is receiving more attention than any campaign in the country–virtually a national campaign from a web perspective–and he’s got a shared server? What is Lieberman paying for his web hosting, ten dollars a month? Any political campaign, especially such a hotly contested senate seat, that doesn’t have a dedicated server and at least one solid backup, should be shot for incompetence. This is looking more and more like either the Lieberman campaign’s own incompetence, or a deliberate setup.

This post on DKos has very good technical details on the situation, with evidence that this was indeed a setup by the Lieberman people–specifically, the site is being run without a firewall, practically begging for an attack, and since no sysadmin would be that stupid, it is likely that it is deliberate.

In the meantime, the media is giving Lieberman great publicity, buying into his victimization story fully, with Lamont as the bad guy.

Meanwhile, Lamont’s campaign has linked to Google’s cached version of Lieberman’s original web site, and has been offering to send their own tech guru to go help put Lieberman’s site back up. The answer from the Lieberman side: silence.

Update: DKos now says that Lieberman’s people were paying $15/mo. for their web hosting and getting 10GB of traffic per month. I don’t know if Kos really knows this or if he just looked at the shared hosting plans for MyHostCamp and guessed–I think he probably guessed. I can’t imagine Lieberman’s site would last two days with only 10GB traffic. Addenda: Kos now lists 74 sites hosted on the same server, including Lieberman’s, in his post–but he still doesn’t say where he’s getting this info, so there’s no way to judge the legitimacy.

Update 2: MyDD has a much more detailed analysis now. The short story: Lieberman’s web admins were incompetent.

I have got to get to sleep…