GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar and one of the biggest web hosts, experienced a big knock-out.
The websites and email accounts hosted by GoDaddy were also down so any domain registered with GoDaddy that used its nameservers and DNS records were also down.
A Brazilian hacker known as AnonymousOwn3r is claiming responsibility, and made it clear this was not an Anonymous collective action.
AnonymousOwn3r’s bio reads “Security leader of #Anonymous (~Official member~).” The hacker hasn’t issued a statement as to why GoDaddy was targeted.
However, AnonymousOwn3r has tweeted “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will understand because i did this attack.”
Last year GoDaddy was pressured into opposing SOPA as customers transferred domains off the service.
According to the service Down For Everyone Or Just Me, the GoDaddy company website was down as well.
Reports on Hacker News also indicate that GoDaddy’s phone support was also down.
On Twitter, GoDaddy said that it is “aware of the trouble people are having with our site” and that it is working on getting things fixed.
GoDaddy’s servers were knocked out with what is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack, in which a site is flooded with traffic until it collapses under the load.
“When I do some DDoS attack, I like to let it down by many days,” the person claiming responsibility said on Twitter. “It can last one hour or one month.”
An Internet service which hosts more than 5 million websites wasn’t protected and this shows the vulnerability of Internet.
“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,” Anup Ghosh, chief scientist with security company Invincea told FoxNews.com.
“Anyone can be hacked, the size of the company has no bearing on it all,” Ghosh said.
Update: According to latest updates, the sites are coming back up, but GoDaddy has yet to confirm whether the outage was due to a distributed denial of service attack — the reason claimed by the Anonymous hacker — or how many customers were actually affected. It has, however, reported that no sensitive information was breached as a result of the outage. Asana however has decided to migrate from GoDaddy.
