GoDaddy: We Were Not Attacked, It Was a Server Problem

By Jane McEntegart
published

Yesterday Anonymous is took responsibility for knocking major web host and GoDaddy offline, causing a wave of associated sites to go down for the count as well. GoDaddy, which hosts more than 5 million sites, was believed to be attacked for publicly supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) earlier this year. "By using/supporting GoDaddy, you are supporting censorship of the Internet," wrote AnonOpsLegion via Twitter on Monday. However, it seems GoDaddy is denying that anonymous is behind yesterday's attack. In fact, according to GoDaddy, there was no attack at all.

A statement on GoDaddy's website states that the outage in service was not caused by "external influences." GoDaddy goes on to specify that it wasn't a hack or a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

"We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," CEO Scott Wagner said in a statement. "Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again."

Regarding GoDaddy's claims that it wasn't hacked, Anonymous security leader Own3r says the company's denial is a ploy to save face. "Whooa @godaddy is denying that it was hacked by me! They don't wanna show their cybersecurity is bad this way they would lose customers!" he tweeted. Own3r says it's only a matter of time before GoDaddy is hacked again.

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Jane McEntegart
35 Comments Comment from the forums
  • blazorthon
    first sentence of articleYesterday Anonymous is took responsibility for knocking major web host and GoDaddy offline, causing a wave of associated sites to go down for the count as well.l
    That "is" and the "and" shouldn't be there. The "and" also gives the impression that there's a word missing rather than an extra "and".

    On topic:
    Any network admins out there, can you describe what would need to be done to hack a system and do something like this? It seems like if it was an attack, it was more complex than the average script kiddie can manage and the response on twitter doesn't seem how someone who's better than a script kiddie would word a response.

    EDIT: added another mistake that was made in the article.
    Reply
  • bllue
    I believe them. The script kiddies in Anonymous couldn't pull this off
    Reply
  • ddpruitt
    I believe them.
    "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence."

    Using a DDOS, which is the only thing Anonymous can seem to do, to bring down that many websites is extremely difficult. Screwing up routing tables and killing websites, now that's easy.
    Reply
  • jellico
    Alrighty... so they'd rather be thought of as incompetent at their core business rather than just a little weak a security. I don't know... I might have gone a different way on this press release.
    Reply
  • Pinhedd
    ddpruittI believe them."Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence."Using a DDOS, which is the only thing Anonymous can seem to do, to bring down that many websites is extremely difficult. Screwing up routing tables and killing websites, now that's easy.
    Any sufficiently shocking display of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    I think "internal network events" is worse than being hacked. Looks like GoDaddy needs to spend more money on their IT staff and less on advertising.
    Reply
  • tupz
    server problem & router config problem are 2 separate things.
    Reply
  • spartanmk2
    Routing loop?
    Reply
  • sun-devil99
    bigdragonI think "internal network events" is worse than being hacked. Looks like GoDaddy needs to spend more money on their IT staff and less on advertising.Very true, I learned that real quick when I worked in their customer care dept. That and they need to offer better salary and benefits if they expect to hire (and for that matter retain) 'IT Staff'.
    Reply
  • chrisjust98
    tupzserver problem & router config problem are 2 separate things.
    You can use a server as a router. Don't know if that's what they do, but it can be done.
    Reply