A diarist at the Kos-style liberal Connecticut blog My Left Nutmeg wants Lieberman’s people held accountable for their “fake hacking story” now that the hacking story “has been 100% debunked” by this Daily Kos post, which declares:

Joe’s site shares one server with 73 other sites. … DoS attacks don’t affect particular accounts on a server. They bring down the whole server. The attack site is up, their campaign site is down. This isn’t a DoS attack.

Now, wait just a minute. If there is an ongoing attack on Lieberman’s site, along the same lines as the attacks that I once suffered (albeit from comment-spam bots, not politically motivated hackers) on a similar shared server back in the day, then it would make perfect sense for Lieberman’s host to “suspend” his site, as a pre-emptive measure, to prevent the other 72 sites from being affected! I.e., they saw the unmanageable bandwidth/CPU usage developing, they nipped it in the bud before it could crash the server, and now Lieberman is stuck without a website. If this is right, the reason they haven’t put Lieberman’s site back online is because, if they did, the attacks would immediately resume, and whole server would then go down! In other words, this is (technically) an unsuccessful DoS attack — but what kept it from being successful is the host’s decision to “suspend” Lieberman’s site. So really, it succeeded in its purpose, just by a different means. That is precisely what happened to me several times back when I was on Total Choice Hosting, and I had to disable my comment scripts or take some other drastic measure to assure them that the attack could not continue before they’d put me back online.

I’m not saying that is definitely what happened, but it’s certainly absurd to claim that Kos’s theory has “100% debunked” the Lieberman camp’s line. You can’t claim my theory isn’t plausible, because this exact same thing has happened to me in the past, when I was on a shared server (Total Choice Hosting) similar to what Lieberman’s people were using.

Now, this doesn’t change what I said before: it’s incredibly stupid that Lieberman was using a low-end commercial shared server for his campaign site. However, I still believe it’s perfectly plausible, indeed likely, that some sort of malicious attack on the site was the “trigger” that knocked it offline.

(Previous post here.)