GoDaddy DNS Hack That Took Down Millions Of Sites Allegedly Came From Member Of Anonymous

Sep 11, 2012 at 8:25am ET by Greg Finn

Yesterday the world’s largest domain provider, GoDaddy, experienced massive DNS outages that took down millions of sites worldwide for several hours. While GoDaddy didn’t disclose the source of the issue, one member of ‘Anonymous” took claim to the outages as his own doing. The Twitter account AnonymousOwn3r has confessed to the alleged attack saying:

Hello everyone who wanna me to put 99% of the global Internet in #tangodown?

— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) September 10, 2012

GoDaddy stated on their website that intermittent outages have occurred and that at no time was any sensitive information compromised.:

At 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers

at 2:43 pm PT. At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.

During the outage, GoDaddy actually moved their DNS over to Verisign, a competitor. The Verisign name servers were not under attack and most of the issues were fixed by the end of the day Monday.

GoDaddy has partaken in questionable activities over the past few years making them an ideal target for disgruntled cyberattackers. From SOPA support to questionable ethics to using sex to sell domains, GoDaddy’s aggressive tactics have made them a target.

For more information on outages & uptime, see the temporary message box on the GoDaddy homepage.

Update: GoDaddy has claimed that an attack was not the driving force behind the outages.

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Domaining | Internet Marketing Industry | Legal

About The Author: Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that specializes in social media and search marketing services and web-based application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 6+ years and specializes in Social Media Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn. See more articles by Greg Finn

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MaydayPictures

I was affected. Although it only happened to one of my sites. I also noticed some people weren’t able to hit a site at the same time I was able to access it, so it seems the “intermittent” description is fitting. All of mine are working fine now.

Oh and I loved how Godaddy didn’t stop their marketing emails from going out yesterday, either. They want me to buy more services when the one’s I’ve already purchased aren’t working?