Was GoDaddy Hacked? - Super Sunday

Hey friends! It's 16th already?! Wow! I'd been very busy since the start of this month and really I wished to post but I couldn't. Sorry about that. A happy Sunday to all of you! :)



Recently I got my newsletters, one of which was about the hacking attack on GoDaddy. If you don't know, GoDaddy is a huge Website Hosting Service on the Internet, though I have never used it I used some other service earlier, but I have heard that it's a nice one. But after that hacking attack, I have security questions about the service! Anyways, the newsletter reminded my of a friend's blog hacked earlier. I thought she might be using GoDaddy for hosting, though I didn't ask her.

From the articles that I read, let me share a few extracts and then we shall continue with our discussions. But first! This news was on the internet on Monday! LOL! I know I'm late, but hey! we are just discussing! :D

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," the company's interim CEO, Scott Wagner, said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)."

After the outage, which affected many Go Daddy customers starting at around 10 a.m PT, someone using the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn2r claimed to have caused the outage with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Service was restored by 4 p.m. PT, the company said.

In his statement, Wagner said that at "no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised." He also apologized to customers for the mishap and thanked them for their patience.

A tweet from the @AnonOpsLegion account: "#TangoDown -- http://www.godaddy.com/ | by@AnonymousOwn3r" was the initial public promotion of the outage, leading some to believe that the Anonymous online activist collective was behind the disruption.

However, the AnonymousOwn3r account clarified in various tweets that: "it's not Anonymous coletive [sic] the attack is coming just from me."

"Duuude? This attack affects not only corporations but also ppl who support your ideology. whats the rationale?" one supposed fan of Anonymous tweeted.

Later, the AnonymousOwn3r account said in response to a question of whether he took down the whole block of DNS (Domain Name System) servers: "yes! it's not so complex."

That was followed by: "when i do some DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack i like to let it down by many days , the attack for unlimited time, it can last one hour or one month."

And the AnonymousOwn3r account explained his actions. "I'm taking godaddy down bacause (sic) well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now."

AnonymousOwn3r was responding to some questions in Portuguese and in one tweet claimed he was from Brazil. Not much is known about this attacker, but his Portuguese past actions are localized in Brazil. His hacks, also labeled #tangodown on Twitter, have taken down plenty of sites before - sites hosting child pornography, Swedish travel interest, and other domains known to support restrictions to online privacy. This is his largest hack to date.

Sources: CNET, and IGN

Okay now back to our discussion. The article amalgamation I made above seems like it's one right? It's three!! haha! :D Anyways, the point that is quite unclear is that was GoDaddy Server hacked or not. As the customers, we believe in the services offered by these big names and then the quarrel between the companies and hackers lands the customers to fret. If you don't pay your bills on time you pay a penalty, then why don't they pay a penalty to us when they are hampered like this? A question, I suppose, quite futile to ask since the things have been this way since ages now! Earlier Yahoo server was hacked and many accounts were leaked over the internet. What's the use? Hackers might be doing it for some specific motives, they might have grudges against these companies, but the only one to suffer is the customer! These hacking attacks have increased by a considerable amount in past sometime, and I guess as individuals we must be careful of choosing the company. Moreover, changing your passwords, and seeing to it that they are STRONG passwords, would be quite a good way to stay safe. But well, with such genius minds doing the wrong act of hacking, perhaps we can only take preventions and not cure!