RE: Lieberman Campaign Says Web Site Hacked

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

The NY Times has the story also and the Lieberman folks are saying it is a
big deal because the campaign has lost access to email:

http://tinyurl.com/qfz2w

The Web site's malfunction disabled campaign e-mail accounts and hampered
communications among field offices and with tens of thousands of supporters,
Mr. Lieberman's advisers said. They said high traffic and connections to the
campaign Web server overwhelmed its allocated bandwidth, the advisers said.
They could not say how great the bandwidth was.

Dan Geary, the Internet consultant to the Lieberman campaign, said that the
site, Joe2006.com, began coming under attack on Monday morning.

"Midmorning yesterday, a very rapid, instant number of server queries to the
site - not just traffic to the site - completely disabled our network,'' he
said. "It's like trying to drink from a fire hose.'' 

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: Dude VanWinkle [mailto:dudevanwinkle () gmail com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 5:10 PM
To: Drsolly
Cc: Richard M. Smith; funsec () linuxbox org
Subject: Re: [funsec] Lieberman Campaign Says Web Site Hacked

On 8/8/06, Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com> wrote:
> > "Voters cannot go to our Web site. They cannot access information,"
Smith
> > said. "It is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters.
>
> I feel *so* disenfranchised.


this link was over on FD:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/8/144119/5628


Quick Update/Summary: The site is setup on a single vulnerable server,
with, apparently, no backup plan. At best, completely incompetent. At
worst, downright Rovian. But since another site is running fine, on
the same server, it's downright bizarre that they couldn't fix Joe's
site in the last 18+ hours - it's obviously not a bandwidth (DoS or
limitation) issue. It appears the party line is that the site was
affected by a "SQL Injection" attack. Whether this was done via the
open and non-firewalled MySQL port on the single linux server, or via
poor form validation, we'll never know (if it was done at all).
Regardless, there is no reason the database can't be cleaned up,
restored or otherwise fixed, in 18 hours, as Matt Stoller points out.

_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.