Update: FBI Said to Probe Hacking AllegationsThe FBI has begun inquiring into allegations that a Web site and email services belonging to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (D) re-election campaign were maliciously tampered with on the eve of Tuesday’s primary election, according to two senior employees at technology firms involved in handling the candidate’s internet services.
The employees also confirmed that the Lieberman campaign had a contract for robust service allowing them several hundred gigabytes of data transfer per month, not a cheaper plan reported previously elsewhere.
Meanwhile, an old web contractor for the Lieberman campaign who claims no involvement in the fiasco has engaged lawyers to address issues with at least one blog which mentioned it in connection to the mess.
Lieberman’s camp, whose candidate has since conceded the primary election to challenger Ned Lamont, charged Monday that the Lamont campaign was responsible for alleged cyberattacks which they said brought down their primary web site and email services. Such “dirty politics” were “a staple” of its operations, asserted Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith. Later, Lieberman spokesman Dan Gerstein admitted to TPM’s Greg Sargent that Lieberman’s staff had no evidence Lamont’s campaign was behind the alleged attacks.
Dan Geary, the Nevada-based web consultant for the Lieberman campaign, confirmed Tuesday that the FBI had contacted him, and he was in the process of providing them with all of his company’s server files relating to the hacked site, joe2006.com.
“We’re wrapping up all the server files for them right now,” Geary said. Samuel Hubbell, owner of the hosting firm myhostcamp.com, which Geary used for the Lieberman site, confirmed this. My call to the FBI’s Las Vegas office was not immediately returned.
I asked Hubbell what kind of account the Lieberman campaign was paying for, and if earlier accounts were accurate that the senator’s camp had taken only a minimal $15-a-month contract.
“They were actually paying quite a bit more, with over 400 gigs of bandwidth a month,” Hubbell said. Hubbell declined to give an exact figure, but Geary said the campaign had been paying around $150 a month for the hosting service. (Earlier, Geary told Paul Kiel the campaign paid “a bit more” than the reported $15 monthly fee.)
“We have a range” of account types, myhostcamp.com’s Hubbell said. “We do smaller ones, we do some larger ones.”
Hubbell said his company’s servers resided at facilities owned by Houston, Tex.-based Server Matrix, also known as The Planet. According to the firm’s Web site, Server Matrix has four hosting datacenters, all located in Texas. The company offers a wide variety of security services, including at least two to protect sites against denial-of-service attacks.
When I spoke with him at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Hubbell said the site had been hacked, but declined to say what kind of attack he believes had been used.
“We’re still trying to figure out where it came from,” Hubbell said. “That’s what we’re investigating. . . I can’t clearly say at this point.”
Geary, the Lieberman campaign’s web consultant, says he began working with the campaign around May or June of this year. Campaign manager Sean Smith, who Geary says joined Lieberman’s camp around the same time, pulled the site from the campaign’s previous web firm, Conn.-based 2 Dog Media, and asked Geary to redesign and host a new site for the candidate. The two men knew each other, Geary said, from working on the Kerry presidential campaign in 2004.
Meanwhile, the owner of 2 Dog Media, Kerry Szeps, has contacted Wonkette.com on behalf of her lawyers, according to the site. Earlier in the day, the site published a report implying Szeps’ company was involved in the current fiasco. “I think anything. . . accusing my company of being involved in the recent downtime of Lieberman’s web site, is damaging to my company,” Szeps told me by phone earlier this evening.
“VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE,” the post at Wonkette.com now reads. “2Dog Media responds: havenât hosted joe2006.com for three months.”
This incident is not the first time Lieberman’s campaign has encountered trouble on the Internet. The campaign web site was hacked a few weeks ago, Geary said earlier today, and its home page was changed to read, “We ownz you site.” In June, it was reported that the FBI was probing the source of pro-Lieberman messages posted to a Connecticut politics blog under the names of notable Democratic politicians.
