Millions of site down as GoDaddy got attacked (updated)

Posted on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 17:18 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
UPDATE September 11, 2012 @ 20:21 CET
GoDaddy issued an official response, claiming the service outage was caused by a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.




Yesterday millions of websites went offline as the DNS servers of hosting and domain registrar firm GoDaddy got attacked by a hacker under the alias of AnonymousOwn3r. The hacker revealed on Twitter that he acted alone and that the action wasn't related to Anonymous. A clear motivation for why he attacked GoDaddy remains unknown. GoDaddy is now back online and says no customer data was compromised.
The company also appears to have migrated control of its DNS servers to its publicly-traded competitor, Verisign. “On Monday afternoon — about four hours after it was knocked offline — GoDaddy’s administrators made a change to the company’s DNS records, indicating that they were shifting control of the servers from GoDaddy to VeriSign,” Wired reported last night.

The outage started Monday evening British time, and not long afterwards someone using the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r claimed he had attacked the company’s servers. Though he refers to himself in his Twitter bio as a “Security leader of Anonymous” (probably jokingly) he also claims to be acting alone, to be from Brazil, and to have been behind another outage that reportedly affected Facebook earlier this year.
Source: Forbes


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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