GoDaddy, a key Web host and the largest domain registrar in the world, went down for much of the day yesterday and took many of the Web sites it services with it.
For several hours, the GoDaddy.com domain was unreachable and Web sites hosted by GoDaddy were also offline. According to reports, domains registered with GoDaddy that use its nameservers and DNS records were also impacted.
GoDaddy issued a statement on Twitter saying: “Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it.”
This was then followed by an update, stating: “So many messages, can't get to you all... Sorry to hear all your frustration. We're working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible.”
Amid the chaos, a member of Anonymous known as “AnonymousOwn3r” claimed responsibility for the attack, saying he was acting by himself and it was not the doing of Anonymous as a collective. AnonymousOwn3r's bio reads: “Security leader of #Anonymous (~Official member~) Your system got Owned by Own3r!”
It is yet to be verified whether the GoDaddy outage was indeed due to a hacker attack, and AnonymousOwn3r has not given any reason as to why GoDaddy was targeted (if it was indeed targeted at all) stating only: “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.” (sic)
Other Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous denied any involvement. The @AnonyOps Twitter account frequently referred people to a story created on Storify, which says: “We did not DDoS GoDaddy. That would be an epic failop. However, some nutbag took credit, so we're taking credit in his demise.”
The @GroupAnon accounted tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: Anonymous Security Council has voted off @AnonymousOwn3r, who has been expelled. Turned out he couldn't spell 'cheese'.”
Courting controversy
Once all services were restored, GoDaddy moved to reassure its users that “at no time was sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords, names, addresses, ever compromised". GoDaddy has also neither confirmed nor denied it was hacked; the company has also not yet provided any details regarding the number of sites that were impacted.
GoDaddy came under fire from the tech community last year when it publicly supported the controversial “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). As a result, a boycott campaign was launched against the company, and eventually led to GoDaddy withdrawing its support for SOPA.
At the time, GoDaddy's newly-appointed CEO, Warren Adelman, said: "Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why GoDaddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better. It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. GoDaddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."
GoDaddy has also been at the centre of a number of other controversies, including a social media campaign against it, after founder Bob Parsons posted video footage and photos online of his elephant hunting trip to Zimbabwe.
On Twitter, people responded to the outage with comments such as: “Are the elephant's relatives coming back for revenge to one of your server farms?”
“GoDaddy servers down after Bob Parsons mistakes them for a herd of elephants.”
“Shocked at how many GoDaddy outage-affected people are in my timeline. They kill elephants, use sexist ads, and support SOPA. Drop 'em.”
“Where was all of this GoDaddy hacking when they supported SOPA? Seems rather late & way too punitive.”
AnonymousOwn3r was also criticised by some Twitter users: “Surprised @AnonymousOwn3r took out @GoDaddy alone. My sites are down, but so are millions of struggling small biz owners.”
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