GoDaddy has acknowledged that one of its employees fell victim to a social engineering attack allowing a hacker to take over a customer’s domain names and eventually extort a coveted Twitter user name from him. PayPal, which the victim claimed also played a role in the attack, denied the accusations.
In a 29 page ruling a California Federal Court denied Godaddy’s motion to have the case filed by the ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURES ARTS AND SCIENCES, (the Oscars) which was filed in 2010, thrown out, denying Godaddy.com the Safe Harbor that domain name registrars typically enjoy.
On Friday, we wrote about how cybercriminals altered the DNS records of Go Daddy sites to serve up malware that demands ransom from victims. The company said it wouldn’t be able to get back to us till Monday, and now it has, mainly to say it is not at fault.
Here’s the full statement, courtesy of Scott Gerlach, Go Daddy’s Director of Information Security Operations:
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."
What's worse for a website hosting company: getting taken down by hackers, or failing to properly configure your network, sparking downtime and lost revenue for customers?
The CEO of website hosting service Go Daddy has said that the company's six-hour outage Monday had nothing to do with a hacktivist, despite a hacker having claimed credit for launching a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) that scuttled the Go Daddy network.
