Texas Governor Blames Web Campaign Flop on Hackers

The kick-off for Texas Governor Rick Perry's 2010 re-election campaign was marred Tuesday by a Web site outage that staffers are now calling a denial-of-service attack. Perry had invited supporters to visit his campaign Web site at 11:30 a.m. Central time on Tuesday to attend a 10-minute online rally billed as "Talkin' Texas." Instead, site visitors were rebuffed with a computer error message. "Today's 'Talkin' Texas' Webcast by Gov. Perry was deliberately interrupted by a denial-of-service attack, preventing countless users from logging in to view the Governor's remarks," the Perry campaign said in a note posted to its Web site. "This planned and coordinated attack was political sabotage, and we are working to identify those responsible for this illegal activity." Before the site crashed, more than 22,000 visitors were able to access the event, the Perry campaign said. But according to local coverage of the incident, the outage did not entirely resemble a distributed denial-of-service attack, (DDoS) which renders the server extremely slow or inaccessible to most visitors. Instead, Austin's KXAN reported that the site displayed the message "Unable to connect to database server," generated by the Drupal content-management platform.