“We are experiencing problems,” said Scott Wagner, the CEO of GoDaddy following hacker claims by someone thought to be a member of the Anonymous group. GoDaddy is one of the largest domain registrars and Web site providers in the world, and the attack has probably affected millions of Web sites. The firm sent a tweet just after 1:30 p.m. ET saying they were aware of the problem their clients had and were working on it.
It is not yet clear how many websites have been impacted in the hacker attack. However, many people have sent messages over various social networking sites complaining they cannot load sites they want or even access the ones they operate. Other people cannot even communicate because their personal e-mail accounts have been affected.
The problem has also impacted some individual servers. GoDaddy’s own main Web site went down briefly. Many websites have been taken offline because the company’s DNS servers do not resolve. The situation has affected even websites that GoDaddy itself does not host because the DNS servers fail to point users to the right pages.
Elizabeth Driscoll, GoDaddy’s spokesperson, said no sensitive customer information had been compromised.
The company made another tweet after 4 p.m. ET saying they were making progress and were still working on the problem. The tweet reassured users to stick with them, as some service had already been restored. Elizabeth Driscoll, GoDaddy’s spokesperson, said no sensitive customer information had been compromised.
Although the exact cause of the outage is still unknown, someone linked to the Anonymous hacktivist group has claimed responsibility. The person claimed full responsibility in a tweet saying “it was only me.” Some members of the Anonymous collective have distanced themselves from the attack while others have praised it.
The attacker’s Twitter account is receiving an average of over 1,500 new followers an hour. Analysis of earlier tweets indicates the hacker is most likely in Brazil, and most of the tweets are written in Portuguese.
If @AnonymousOwn3r really worked alone, it would be quite remarkable, as it will most likely be the largest single takedown so far.
GoDaddy has over 53 million registered domain names. The company claims to be the largest provider of secure websites in the world. Whether it was an outage or attack, the situation has already negatively impacted many businesses in different parts of the world. It will also most likely have a serious knock-on effect to the company.
