Reports are coming in that Gov. Rick Perry's re-election campaign kickoff in Texas had a less than auspicious beginning. Quoting Peggy Fikac blogging at mysanantonio.com:
Gov. Rick Perry's much-touted "Talkin' Texas" online campaign event included
eyebrow-raising proposals such as a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and voter approval before state taxes can be raised.
The live Web cast also was unavailable to me and lots of other people who couldn't log in, showing that if you live by the Internet, you can be attacked on the Internet. That's what the campaign says happened.
"We were definitely hacked. We'll have a statement shortly. The whole site is down," said Perry spokesman Mark Miner.
Let me remind you that Rick Perry is the same Republican Texas governor who contemplated the secession of Texas from the Union while attending a teabaggers' party. He has an atrocious record on environmental policy, on reproductive rights, and a worse one on gay rights. He also hates bicyclists.
It is without question that his online reelection campaign kickoff event was a massive fail, with the streaming video of the event not streaming. The question is, however, whether it was a genuine hack or a result of incompetence. Remember Joe Lieberman's site going down the night before the Democratic primary in Connecticut because the bills for the web service were not paid, and Lieberman's campaign hacks (pun intentional) falsely blaming the mess on Lieberman's opponent Ned Lamont?
Now, the service provider for the Perry site says (according to Peggy Fikac again) that there indeed was a hack...
I talked with Anthony Kukla, the president of Redglue, Inc., the Austin-based service provider for Perry's campaign and the event. Kukla described it as a denial-of-service attack called a SYN flood. He said it occurred around 11:20 a.m., ten minutes before Perry was to start his announcement.
However, Phillip Martin at burntorangereport.com doubts that...
If you're going to promote a major event, you need to pay for a hosting server that can handle it. What is more likely -- that someone hacked a meaningless video announcement, or that Rick Perry's team just screwed this whole thing up?
My own digging shows that the Perry for Governor site (I won't link to it) is now hosted on Apache under Linux, however, previously it was run on (don't laugh!) IIS under... Windows 98. Perry's service provider site runs IIS again (under Windows 2000), which to me is not exactly a great recommendation for the competence of its operator. Lastly, Phillip Martin at burntorangereport.com took a screen grab of the crash, and that thing looks very much like an internal error which could be caused either by a denial of service attack or simply by more outside connections than the server could handle:
Unable to connect to database server
If you still have to install Drupal, proceed to the installation page. If you have already finished installing Drupal, that either means that the username and password information in your settings.php file is incorrect or that we can't connect to the MySQL database server. This could mean your hosting provider's database server is down.
The MySQL server error was: Too many connections.
In any case, some people somewhere are definitely going to experience some Schadenfreude. Before y'all start gloating though, be aware that you will be gloating together with the Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who will run against Perry for Governor, and whose spokesperson was reported to comment...
"What an embarrassing campaign launch," said Hutchison spokeswoman Jennifer Baker. "I'm sure the governor is hacked but we are skeptical their site was. After all, Rick Perry isn't exactly a stranger when it comes to arrogantly blaming others for his mistakes."