GoDaddy Hacked 2012: Millions of Sites Go Down in Registrar Outage
GoDaddy has been hacked Monday September 10, 2012. A malicious flood of network traffic was enough to knock the Internet registrar's servers temporarily offline. The hack meant that the GoDaddy website, as well as millions of other websites registered through the site, went down.
As soon as the sites went down a Twitter user emerged to claim responsibility for the hack. The chief scientist with security company Invincea, Anup Ghosh, has described it as a denial of service attack (DDoS).
Ghosh, in comments to Fox News, said: "This is yet another example of how anyone with an agenda can take down large portions of the Internet with really cheap, off-the-shelf tools."
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The outage to GoDaddy has shocked many in the industry, as a DDoS attack is a relatively simple web attack, and many would have thought a site as large as GoDaddy would be able to protect itself against such an assault.
A DDoD attack is where a server is flooded with an overwhelming amount of information causing it to crash.
GoDaddy hosts more than 5 million websites.
Ghosh has said, "Anyone can be hacked, the size of the company has no bearing on it all."
A Twitter user with an account titled "Anonymous Own3r" immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, and emphasized that it was nothing to do with the hacking group "Anonymous."
The user wrote, "It is not Anonymous collective it's only me. Don't use Anonymous collective name on it, just my name."
"I'm taking godaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now," the user added.
GoDaddy was quick to reassure customers that it was working hard to resolve the issues. The company tweeted, "We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it."
About two hours later the company also gave an update: "Update: Still working on it, but we're making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us."
GoDaddy's own site came back into service late Monday afternoon.
