A lone hacker has claimed responsibility for the attack on GoDaddy which may have knocked out millions of websites.
The attack began about 10am PST 10th September and appeared to be target at their DNS servers. These servers are responsible for resolving doman names to IP address to allow web browsers to find their target and mail to flow properly. Without functioning public DNS records organisations can disappear off the Internet almost instantly.
The individual claiming responsibility for the outage goes by the Twitter handle AnonymousOwn3r. Although that account’s Twitter bio describes the them as “Security leader of #Anonymous” and “Anonymous Official member,” a number of Twitter feeds affiliated with the hacker collective say that Anonymous was not involved.
So far no reason has been given for the attack but it’s likely to be linked to GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Yet again a major corporation has shown how fragile they are against attacks by motivated individuals and groups on the Internet and this is unlikely to be the last attack.
Find the right infosec staff to protect your company with Tiro Security, a specialist provider of IT Security jobs located in the heart of Silicon Beach in Los Angeles, California.