So if you're an American political junkie, you know that Joe Lieberman losts his primary campaign to Ned Lamont earlier this week. If you're an extreme political junkie, you'll be familiar with the tale of joe2006.com, though the tale keeps changing as the days move on.

Currently, joe2006.com is hosted at godaddy.com and reads:

STATEMENT FROM SEAN SMITH: "For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman's website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State's Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review."

"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."

Back on the 8th, TPMmuckraker had this in an interview with Lieberman's tech consultant.

Lieberman's internet consultant Dan Geary, who oversees Joe2006.com, says he's still sure that their site suffered a "malicious attack." But when pressed, he said that they weren't sure that it was a "Denial of Service" attack, as he'd said earlier. He didn't have any more information about the nature of the supposed attack. "I've spent 99% of my time speaking [to reporters] about the story," he said.

Doesn't sound like a tech guy with convincing evidence of a coordinated attack by political opponents, but the campaign hasn't withdrawn the accusations 2 days later.

About 12 hours ago TPMmuckraker posted updated statements from the two tech consultants. The story is sounding less and less like a coordinated attack by political opposition and more and more like a poorly configured, poorly maintained web host.

This story at the Daily Kos lists off the other sites hosted by MyHostCamp.com. 2 days later and those sites are available. Though interestingly the MyHostCamp.com site itself provides a redirect to a suspended page.

The sites hosted with MyHostCamp though have their mail directed to the same server as is hosting their websites. Seems very very small time and insecure to be using 1 server to handle . Some poking and prodding shows that port 25 smtp (simple mail transfer protocol) on the server is currently refusing connections, so these companies will not be receiving new emails. Port 110 pop3 (post office protocol) is up and running, so clients will be able to retrieve their old email off the server. FTP (file transfer protocol) is also still running on the server and does not allow anonymous log-in.

The fact that smtp is shut off meshes with the most recent TPMmuckraker comments on the server going down due to large quantities of spam being directed through the server. Spammers are notorious in looking for websites that send email via forms as this will allow the spammer to cover their tracks. It sounds like spammers discovered a mail producing form that was accessible via an external script. It's possible a combination of a poorly configured form with a poorly configured mail server would bring a server to its knees given the double whammy of high server load from the web server processing forms and high server load due to the smtp server grinding away on delivering all of the incoming spam. The conflicting and changing stories from Lieberman's two tech consultants though makes it difficult to confirm that this was the primary cause of the site failure.

Joomla, the open source content management system joe2006 was using, also has a spotty security record as this post from mid-July explains. The main package had a security update released on the third week of June, which isn't quite as "fresh" and "untested" as the Lieberman consultants have suggested to the TPMmuckraker crowd. Even the find of the extcalendar module running in the old joe2006 joomla site was patched on the 19th of July. Still more than 2 weeks of lead time, which is an eternity in terms of internet security.

As long as the details of "the attack" keep changing and the stories from the "professionals" running joe2006.com don't match, it's hard to know for certain what happened. But it seems pretty clear that it wasn't a politically motivated hack and that it's time for the accusations by Lieberman's team to be removed from the internet and a public apology issued to Ned Lamont.