GoDaddy and its reported 48 million domain names were hit with what is reported as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by a single member of Anonymous, “AnonymousOwn3r”. While the extent of the outage is not known, its effects are clearly pretty extensive and still being experienced.
@GoDaddy 1:04 PM – 10 Sep 12 :
Update: Still working on it, but we’re making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.
A series of tweets have played out the assumed responsibility by AnonymousOwn3r, and in one of the messages he states:
I’m taking godaddy down bacause well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now.
The scenario points out a major sore point regarding the vulnerability of the internet. The DNS system has been long exposed as a weak point. Whether by human error, or by malicious attack, the hierarchical system of public servers that resolve common names to IP addresses has been the crux of a number of outages. It is particularly disturbing that this particular attack, now hours old, was allegedly executed by a lone hacker. The type of attack purportedly executed against this target was DDOS, which unleashes a malicious flood of traffic and requests at a target. There is little in the way of effective protection to a DDOS attack, as the source of the attack is distributed by nature, and very hard to track down or filter out.
[...] first reported on the attack shortly after it broke at 10:25am PDT yesterday. Go Daddy technicians battled for more than four [...]
[...] the Internet a cell of Anonymous crawled out of the woodwork to claim credit for the outage. It was quickly reported here at SiliconANGLE that the outage was the result of a DDoS attack—and that sort of claim would have been credible: it’s well known that it’s possible to knock [...]