"Sticks and stones may break my bones," but will "name calling" define Joe Wilson? This South Carolina’s congressman knows how to call presidents liars but does he know how to defend himself against a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack?
Piryx, an online political start-up firm was targeted in a DDoS attack on its web site as a result of what some feel was the firm’s alliance with Joe Wilson. Commencing at 4:12pm ET, September 11, it wasn’t until 2:45am ET the following day that it was finally brought under control.
Piryx is run by a group of young tech guys headed up by Tom Serres out of Austin, Texas. Serres Tom Serresdefines his company’s mission as a way to ignite a much needed involvement among the voter community, while allowing candidates at all levels to have the tools and information they need for equal footing when campaigning for a government position in the current digital age.
Obama and his administration have been hugely successful pre- and post election in harnessing the power of social media, and one of Piryx’s goals is to jump into that fray in a similar fashion, by providing a new online fund-raising channel for candidates.
According to a Mashable report,"in this case a motive is easy to speculate upon – Wilson had received $200,000 in donations on Piryx as of Friday morning…(and) recent reports claim his fund-raising total has now exceeded $1 million."
What prompted the attack may be Wilson’s half-hearted apology to Obama on September 10. This was given in a YouTube video address that was accompanied by a statement that talked about his continued stance in taking Obama to task, while at the same time requesting campaign donations.
The statement read:
- (9.10.09) — Donate to Joe Wilson and show him you stand behind him and his taking Barack Obama to task for Obama’s misleading statements regarding the failure known as ObamaCare.
The video of Wilson’s speech was delivered as follows…
DDoS attacks against major social media sites are known by many in the Twitterverse, as a result of Twitter being brought down on August 5, when an unsuspecting blogger in the republic of Georgia was under a similar attack by factions based in neighboring Russia.
This is an interesting commentary as to how social media can create support on the one hand while also being a stimulus to trigger mayhem and disruption on the other. Since social networking is an extension of the people, I guess one could see the similarities between the indignity of ‘name-calling’ with the senseless mass disruption of service to a Web site. One is no better than the other. And in this case, the former may have been the cause of the latter.
