www.kucinich.us attacked?

[Hun Joro]

I just got this email from the Kucinich for Congress Committee:

Dear Friend:

Under circumstances that can best be described as "suspicious," the www.kucinich.us website was crippled early this morning a few hours after Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 extensively documented Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush.

Until we can restore the website and implement additional security measures, you can find the full list and detailed Articles at
http://www.democrats.com/files/amomentoftruth.pdf
and http://chun.afterdowningstreet.org/amomentoftruth.pdf

If you would like to show your support for the Congressman's efforts, please go to myinfo.kucinich.us to offer your comments and provide us with contact information so that we can continue to keep you informed.

Thank you
Committee to Re-Elect Congressman Kucinich

[mikelgb]

1. nice

[conspirator]

2. maybe a lot of people were curious to surf his website n/t

[spanone]

3. another bu$hco koinkydink

[lynnertic]

4. I'm betting my money on a surge of popularity. It's called the "slashdot effect"

because back in the day, when Slashdot was THE place to go for news, just about any site mentioned on slashdot would crash, crippled by the sudden popularity.

I'm glad they had some mirrors.

[Hun Joro]

5. Maybe so. I'm not sure what they meant by suspicious circumstances.

[kestrel91316]

6. I can think of a number of "DUers" who would happily cripple

Kucinich's website.

The posts attacking him on here are disgusting.

[Swamp Rat]

7. Me too

:(

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. Yep

[lonestarnot]

12. Burns my ass!

[jberryhill]

9. Cheap Shared Hosting + Heavy Traffic

Kucinich.us doesn't have a dedicated server. There are 489 websites hosted on the same server.

http://whois.domaintools.com/kucinich.us

I'll bet the rest of them are wondering what happened to their website.

[CatholicEdHead]

10. Or it could be a Distributed Denial of Service

It does not take many zombie machines to ICMP ping a site to take it out. Maybe the ISP's router needs to be hardened and configured to drop packets.

[jberryhill]

13. And the point of taking down kucinich.us for a few hours is.... what? /nt

[ConsAreLiars]

15. Are you accusing them of lying?

They said code was changed, and that their servers had the capacity needed. What evidence do you have to back up your accusations, or are you just sliming?

Edit to add: Of course, the question is rhetorical and the answer obvious. Maybe a better question would be why you want to slime Kucinich and to what end? But, of course, expecting an honest answer would be just foolish. Maybe you want to try more lies?

[jberryhill]

16. Wow.. that's impressive

There's a wide degree of technical understanding in any chain of communication, and no I'm not paranoid to believe that every mistatement or misunderstanding is premised on a "lie".

A lot of folks jump to conclusions when something goes wrong with their site.

For example, I administer the domain name and name servers for Green Delaware and www.greendel.org, and have done so for years. The site had a technical glitch recently, and the guy who runs the site was convinced it was the result of recent political action undertaken by Green Delaware, and was made a target by press coverage of the action.

The actual problem - I had missed a renewal notice for the domain name, and it had briefly lapsed.

Traffic can really screw up a lot of things, and it can be interpreted as a code failure.

The Kucinich site is on a shared server with 489 other websites - that's as many as 489 other people who can change files on that server.

But to give you another example... During the 2004 campagin when Cheney mis-spoke and said "factcheck.com" instead of "factcheck.org", I made a call to the Factcheck.org folks on the other side of town to see if they wanted to get the traffic that was pouring in. They were having a hard time keeping their site going as it was, in part due to the controversy that arose from our having directed the factcheck.com traffic to the website of George Soros (which at the time was entitled "Why we must not re-elect George Bush). The other call I made was to the Soros' people to make sure they weren't pissed off about the traffic. Their position was "We aren't asking for it, but we are putting extra capacity online to deal with it."

A good political story can send traffic through the roof, and Kucinich does not have dedicated hosting.

It's something I've seen happen:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-10-06-cheney-error_x.htm

The lawyer, John Berryhill, said Wednesday that the company's owners — whom he declined to name — are not fans of Bush or Cheney. When they saw the number of users clicking on "factcheck.com" start to soar Tuesday night, they feared the traffic would "crash" their computer. But they also saw a chance to tweak the president and vice president.
<...>
At "factcheck.org," — the site Cheney wanted people to see — the number of "visitors" also soared Wednesday. At various points in the day the organization's computer crashed because of excess demand. Brooks Jackson, the Web site's director, said Wednesday's traffic far exceeded 63,000, the most visitors in a day previously.


What's your experience with this kind of situation?

[ConsAreLiars]

18. Cute and self aggrandizing, but irrelevant.

They said the code on the Kucinich site was altered/hacked. That is a rather different thing than getting slashdotted by too many hits.

[jberryhill]

19. Self aggrandizing?

I just wanted to note that I have direct experience with the topic.

Yes, the operators of greendel.org were convinced they were hacked when the domain name expired.

"They said" in any organization having any number of people with different abilities, does not necessarily mean "someone that actually knows what happened said", unless that organization is The Borg.

What, specifically was the hack? Have they reported the incident to law enforcement? If they need a computer forensics expert to help catch the perps, I can refer several. I've put a malicious hacker behind bars in the past as well, and I would be happy to help out here.

But what I can tell you from experience is that it is very common to believe that one has been the subject of a cyber attack when the cause may lie elsewhere, and its not a matter of dishonesty. I was involved in the recovery of a stolen domain name recently, and had a few email problems after that. My immediate thought was that the hacker was going after my server for revenge.

What "code" was "altered/hacked". That statement could mean any number of things. What specifically happened?

[jberryhill]

17. Try this...

Compare the loading speed of kucinich.us to any of these other sites listed here:

http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/?hostname=kucinich.us

[Yukari Yakumo]

20. For more lulz...

barackobama.com comes up with...
3 more sites on the same IP addy:

Desperatehillaryattacks.com - Nothing here. "Address Not Found"
Desperationwatch.com - Nothing here. "Address Not Found"
Obamabulletin.com

I find this mildly amusing.

[jberryhill]

21. If you want to monitor an interesting nameserver...

Keep an eye on Smartechcorp.com.

In the past two days, they have registered every variation of ObamaBadFor<state>.com.

They are the same outfit that ran the amazing White House private email service that manages to lose thousands of email messages at every critical time.

[lonestarnot]

11. I got that email too, but I'm not sure who really sent it so I'm waiting for the actual site to

get back in order.

[magellan]

14. Reported earlier today, code was messed with in attempt

...to gain access to the site. They were busy working on securing things and getting the site back up.