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GoDaddy, the worldwide known company for hosting websites and domain registration, created in 1997, experienced a surprise early Monday when the website was hacked and successfully shut down. This affected 10.5 million customers that consist of small businesses and other big forums like eBaum’s. On Twitter, Anonymous hacktivists claimed responsibility for the take down. The account @AnonOpsLegion explained, “#TangoDown – godaddy.com,” as well as @TibitXimer who said, “Basically, every GoDaddy site on the planet just crashed,” in retaliation for supporting the popular internet legislation SOPA, but later changed their stance on the issue.
However, the culprit appears to be a sole individual @AnonymousOwn3r, which tweeted out Monday, “the attack is not coming from Anonymous coletive [sic], the attack it’s coming only from me” as well as saying the move was done “to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now.” GoDaddy has not officially labeled anyone as guilty and their latest statements on the issue are, “Most customer hosted sites back online. We’re working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. No customer data compromised.”
Interestingly enough, the main account that claimed responsibility, @AnonymousOwn3r also commented on the method he/or she used to bring down GoDaddy’s servers, which was a DDoS attack. “When I do some DDoS attack, I like to let it down by many days,” the hacker claimed on Twitter.
Other individuals claim that a DDoS attack would have not been plausible due to the size of GoDaddy and their massive data center with load bearing, which are walls that hold significant amounts of information. Leaving skepticism as to how the attack was able to access GoDaddy’s servers, that resulted in millions of customers hurt many of who use for small businesses.
Bringing more pieces into the picture, shows another Anonymous account on Twitter, @AnonyOps tweeting out, “He’s either a newbie to activism and cutting his teeth by doing this, which is misguided, or he’s trying to give Anons a bad reputation,” distancing their account from others who claimed responsibility. Overall showing the more legitimate account has backed down from the Monday hack.
Ironically, the hacktivist culture Anonymous claims to dislike government although after yesterday many want to know more. The initial thought of taking down a group like GoDaddy who supported restricting internet freedom seems good, but by effecting millions that are customers to the site and people who have nothing to do with government only hurts the cause and actually helps the government. Tying this together with the “more legitimate” Anonymous account’s denial of responsibility and the fact DDoS attacks would have been very challenging on servers like GoDaddy’s, reveal what could be an even bigger picture.
On September 7th, the Washington Post published an article with comments from White House spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden who explained, “an Executive Order is among the things we’re considering to fulfill the president’s direction to us to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyberthreats,” alluding to the power grab by the President and an upcoming curb on internet freedom. With questions lingering about Monday’s GoDaddy take down; many on social media have talked about the idea of a “false-flag” attack. The wrongdoer of GoDaddy technically remains unknown at this time.
Related articles
- GoDaddy stopped by massive DDoS attack (go.theregister.com)
- GoDaddy: Outage did not result from a hack (fox13now.com)
- GoDaddy outage: Hacker claim to take down millions of GoDaddy sites (wjla.com)
- GoDaddy Goes Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility (it.slashdot.org)
- GoDaddy Sites Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility (manolith.com)
- GoDaddy.com Hacked By Anonymous (cbsnews.com)
- Anonymous member takes down GoDaddy, countless websites affected (panarmenian.net)
- GoDaddy.com and hosted sites down, Anonymous claims credit (theverge.com)
- GoDaddy suffers major outage (geek.com)
- GoDaddy Hacked By Anonymous Member, Millions Of Sites Down (valuewalk.com)
