Apparently, all it took was one really dedicated, really skilled hacker to take out a vast swath of the Internet, including this website and all the other websites hosted on my domain. That man was an Anonymous-affiliated hacker named AnonymousOwn3r, and his target was GoDaddy. A hacker knocked GoDaddy offline completely, taking down 48 million websites and affecting 9.3 million customers in the process. Apparently, the hacker has a problem with GoDaddy’s previous support of SOPA/PIPA and other unnamed reasons behind his actions.
“At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised,” wrote GoDaddy VP for public relations Elizabeth L. Driscoll. “We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours.”
The attack kicked off at about 10:25 AM Pacific time and most of the websites were down until 2:43 PM. Fortunately, it appears that GoDaddy has gotten everything back online and seems to be handling the security breach well. Apparently, the DNS web servers themselves were knocked out of commission by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Hence, no websites for anyone, even if the websites themselves were (thankfully) not damaged.
The fact that one dude can knock out the bulk of the Internet is astounding to me. Like Ron Burgandy once said, “How’d you do that? I’m not even mad; that’s amazing.”
Tags: GoDaddy, web hosts, web servers, GoDaddy outage, GoDaddy outage knocks out 48 million websites, GoDaddy outage affects 9.3 million customers, Anonymous, DNS, AnonymousOwn3r, websites knocked offline by hacker, anonymous security leader takes down godaddy, ddos, distributed denial of service