Hacker Claims Old-School Tactic Brought GoDaddy to Its Knees

Someone with the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r made a grab for 15 minutes of fame last week by claiming responsibility for taking down the network for Internet's largest registrar, GoDaddy.

GoDaddy discredited that claim. "The service outage was not caused by external influences," CEO Scott Wagner said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a 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."

Whether @AnonymousOwn3r tried to take down GoDaddy or not, the method he claimed he used for the attack was an interesting one, and one not commonly used by hackers these days. He said he mounted the attack with a botnet controlled through Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instead of through a typical command and control (C&C) server.