"We Have Met the Hackers, and They are Us"

When the Lieberman website went down on election eve and the campaign spent lots of free media time the next day claiming that it had been "hacked" by the Lamont campaign and/or Lamont supporters, my first reaction was, "that's bullshit". I've spent enough time baby-sitting servers to know that traffic spikes a lot during the last few days of an election. It seemed obvious to me that what really happened was that the website went down under a perfectly predictable surge in traffic that the campaign was, for whatever reason, not prepared to handle.

And thanks to Kos and alexa.com, we now have some nice charts to prove it. Here's my favorite:

Wow, nice spike! It looks like Lamont's site was seeing about double the number of pageviews as Lieberman's was, and yet it was able to stay up and running. It looks like the Lieberman campaign "hacked" themselves.

One more thing. I will not be surprised at all to find out that an analysis Lieberman's server logs shows a lot of attempts to gain access to the server or shut it down. The net is full of already-hacked machines spewing out all sorts of automated attacks — I see them in my logs every day. These sorts of attacks aren't news or evidence of targeted malice, they're just a fact of life.