Godaddy Hacked - But Not by Anonymous

On Monday, the web host and domain registrar GoDaddy went down, taking millions of its customer’s sites along with it. This is likely the largest internet hack of all time.

As of 2:15pm pacific time, everything is still down. This hack could be impacting over 5 million websites.

The communication about the problem came through the GoDaddy Twitter account. The company acknowledged it was aware of the problem and is trying to resolve it.

According to TechCrunch.com, customers have been complaining that GoDaddy hosted e-mailaccounts, GoDaddy phone service and all the sites utilizing GoDaddy’s large Domain Name System (DNS) service are also down, affecting people worldwide. However the issue appears to be impacting sites hosted by godaddy only. Sites that have their domain registered at Godaddy but hosted elsewhere appear to be working which would mean that the actual NDS servers are likely not the target of the attack.

Go Daddy is the host of 5 million web sites globally and it oversees a total of 52 million domain names. Because the company provides domain name services for a large portion of its managed names, a DNS outage impairs millions of web sites on Internet.

In April, former CEO Warren Adelmansaid to Data Center Knowledge, “We handle 10 billion DNS queries a day. A good chunk of the Internet resolves because of us.”

This isn’t the first time that Go Daddy has been attacked electronically. It is a frequent target on the five million web sites that it hosts. The company has said it blocks 2.5 million brute force attacks hourly and they are monitored in the company’s Scottsdale headquarters.

How did Monday’s attack happen?

Some tweets have said that a member of Anonymous known as AnonymousOwn3r has claimed responsibility and tweeted it is not an Anonymous collective action.

Here’s the tweet that apprised everyone, courtesy of AnonOpsLegion with its 3,900 Twitter followers: #TangoDown – godaddy.com | by @AnonymousOwn3r |

AnonymousOwn3r’s bio says, “Securityleader of #Anonymous (~Official member~).” The individual is supposedly from Brazil but he/she hasn’t explained why GoDaddy was the target of today’s take down.

Godaddy has been accused of fraudulent business practices and sales fraud selling unsuspecting non tech savvy consumers hosting plans that godaddy claims have unlimited bandwidth, but once businesses become successful enough, they are forced to migrate to a dedicated hosting plan. Such migrations can cost a business thousands of dollars. It is unfortunate that these small business were affected by the attack, however it may be a wakeup call for small business owners that Godaddy is not a professional hosting solution.

According to Tech Crunch, in 2011,GoDaddyhad been pressured to oppose SOPA, the upopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills. GoDaddy became a target of protests after their public opposition.

Customers started moving domains from the service but whether this was connected to AnonymousOwn3r, a tweet came out “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will undestand because i did this attack.”

Angry responses followed for the AnonymousOwn3r tweets including, ”Duuude? This attack affects not only corporations but also ppl who support your ideology. whats the rationale?” tweeted Miguel Govea.

Kyle Scott, a sports blogger according to NBC,tweeted, “So you’re all about openness and freedom yet you take down thousands of independent websites that help with that cause?”

Because GoDaddy is aware of the issue and concerns, hopefully it will be resolved soon.