GoDaddy Breach Devastating to Small Business Websites

On Monday, the web hosting provider and domain registrar, GoDaddy was the target of one of the most high profile hacker attacks and security breaches within the hosting industry in recent times. As a result of the breach, GoDaddy.com and the sites hosted by it experienced extended downtime yesterday.

As Go Daddy said in a statement on Monday afternoon, “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. ”

Apparently the attack was made by one of the supporters of the notorious hacking group Anonymous, who goes under the Twitter name “Anonymous Own3r.”

Following the attack, Go Daddy’s site was inaccessible for much of Monday. As reported by the Associated Press, sites hosted by Go Daddy who were facing problems as a result of the attack numbered anywhere between thousands to millions.

“Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it,” was Go Daddy’s message via its Twitter feed once the attack began. Sometime later, another message on Twitter said that the company was “getting closer to normal” while the web hosting provider also thanked its customers for their “patience and understanding.”

Many believe that the attack was made by the hacker group Anonymous. However, the person who later came forward and claimed the credit for the attack said that it was a one-person operation. That seems to be evident from this Twitter post by Anonymous Own3r,“Tell the people to not understand wrong the attack is coming only from me.” His Twitter username, however, seems to indicate that he is not only allied with the hacker group Anonymous, but also one of its founders.

Anonymous is one of the most notorious hacking groups in the world right now. At this point, it is still not quite clear what kind of tactic was used in the attack, namely whether it was a DDoS attack or a data breach. More details will doubtlessly follow in the coming days.

About Lynne OConnor

Lynne has been writing technical documentation for computer software since 1988 and began applying her technology marketing expertise to the Internet in 1995 with website design and development, expanding into social media marketing in 2007. Currently, she is a freelance writer and content manager for several websites and technology companies.