DNS Outage: GoDaddy Hacked Or Not? | TechTree.com

DNS Outage: GoDaddy Hacked Or Not?

Censorship > Outrage > Hacking > Outage > Denial > Outrage.

 

A DNS outage at GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar, left thousands of sites inaccessible on Monday in the US (Tuesday India time). A report by Wired says GoDaddy moved its own DNS servers temporarily to arch-rival Verisign.

The owner of the Twitter handle Anonymousown3r said he had brought GoDaddy's servers down with a DDoS attack: "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."

Twist #1 is, Godaddy claimed that the outage was because of a technical problem — "The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)." Not everyone has bought that statement.

The twist to that is, hacker group Anonymous says the hack was done by one individual (Anonymousown3r, as above), and that it was unendorsed by the group: "(It) is misguided, or he’s trying to give Anons a bad reputation," according to a Twitter message from @AnonyOps to at a reporter.

The third twist (potentially) is that the hacker who claimed responsibility said that GoDaddy's denial of a denial of service attack was inviting another attack, The Register reports: "I think i will have to bring down godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack."

GoDaddy is the registrar for 50 million domains, so security breaches are quite a serious matter. Naturally, that number also means that hackers see a lot of potential there.

Unfortunately for those of us with sites registered (or hosted) with them, GoDaddy Inc. decided last year to support the SOPA legislation. They revised their position later, but their initial support made GoDaddy an even more attractive target for would-be hackers.


TAGS: Internet, Anonymous, RMR

 
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