Ron Paul’s Website Attacked During Online Fundraiser

Libertarian-leaning presidential contender and congressman Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) turned 76 years old yesterday. As part of his birthday celebration, Dr. Paul and his campaign team decided to hold a “money-bomb,” or day-long online fundraising push.

The congressman has had extraordinary success with money-bombs in the past, and has them regularly. He was the first candidate in U.S. history to raise one million dollars in a day via the internet.

His goal for yesterday’s birthday money-bomb was an aggressive $1.5 million. Not surprisingly, he was making great strides towards that goal as the day progressed.

Then came the devastating news from Paul’s campaign. At approximately 10:40pm Eastern, the Ron Paul Facebook page posted the following status update:

“The ronpaul2012.com website is under cyber attack. Our team is working to fix this as we speak. So sorry to all who have tried to make donations and could not. We’ll have more info ASAP.”

Speculation as to the cause and source if the web failure began quickly circulating the internet. Some were saying that the website’s servers simply couldn’t handle the traffic (something this author doubts do to the large number of successful money-bombs Paul has had in the past). Others speculated that the attacker was some Republican that wanted to slow Paul’s recent successes. (A little more reasonable of a theory, since Paul is often considered a radical to ignore within his own party, but has had many recent positive movements in his campaign.)

The truths is, it doesn’t matter who the attacker is. It could be someone just out to make a name for themselves in the hacker world. Or, as earlier stated, there may be no attacker at all.

The site was finally up and going before midnight, and the site announced they were extending the money-bomb until noon today to allow a chance to donate to those that could not.

By the time midnight struck, the money-bomb had raised $1.49 million of their $1.5 million goal. Because there’s some extra time on the clock now, the campaign has increased the goal to $1.75 million.