GoDaddy’s Death Can Kill Some of the Internet….Here’s How! Update: NOT Hacked

For the first time in years, I experienced downtime yesterday. For a few hours, LosEvolution.com was inaccessible.

Well, for many like myself, this was due to GoDaddy’s DNS servers being down. It turns out that the hosting giant was hacked, taking millions of sites down.

One Twitter user, named @AnonymousOwn3r, claimed sole responsibility for the alleged attack, stating, “was only me not the Anonymous [collective]”. On his Twitter profile, he claims to be a “security leader of #Anonymous.” He goes on to say in an earlier tweet that he was “behind many things such like irc, ops, attacks [sic].”

His Twitter account has seen more than 1,500 new followers per hour on average, and continues to retweet coverage from various news sites and agencies.

@AnonOpsLegion, an account linked to the Anonymous collective, praised the hacker for his alleged work. Many of the hacker’s tweets are in Portugese, suggesting he is in Brazil, based on analysis of earlier tweets.

Christina Warren, entertainment editor at Mashable, empathized with the customers who are struggling with downed website. She said: “But the epicness of this sort of hack cannot be denied. I mean, hot damn. That’s a huge get.”

But one of the ‘main’ Anonymous account, @YourAnonNews, has distanced the hacking collective from the alleged attack, saying in a tweet: “Please redirect your godaddy hate to @AnonymousOwn3r says is the ‘leader’ of Anonymous.”

If this was the work of a lone hacker taking down tens of millions of websites, it would be the largest takedown of any service ever.

– ZDNet

The largest indeed. It was only a few hours, but multiple users felt the impact. Hopefully we won’t feel this again.

 
UPDATE:

“The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a ”˜hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS),”, the company’s interim chief executive, Scott Wagner said.

– Forbes

”@AnonymousOwn3r, the account of a user who took credit for taking down GoDaddy, says the following on Twitter

@godaddy says corrupted router data tables do you guys think an error would down 72 millions of websites? they don’t wanna lose customers!