GoDaddy: Hack Didn't Cause Service Outage

Series of Internal Network Events Corrupted Router Data Tables
GoDaddy: Hack Didn't Cause Service Outage

GoDaddy.com, which hosts websites for millions of small businesses, says a distributed denial of service attack did not cause an outage its customers experienced on Sept. 10.

See Also: Resiliency Orchestration with Cyber Incident Recovery

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," GoDaddy Interim Chief Executive Officer Scott Wagner says in a statement posted on the company's website Sept. 11. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack.

"We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again."

Wagner reemphasized a previous company statement that at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of its systems compromised. "Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure," he says. "This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it."

On Sept. 10, an individual claiming to be part of Anonymous, the hacktivist group that has targeted big business and government, said in a Twitter post that it targeted GoDaddy, disrupting services to thousands, if not more, of its customers. Another Twitter post, also claiming to represent Anonymous, denied it had anything to do with the GoDaddy outage [see Did Anonymous Target GoDaddy?].

Anonymous claims are difficult to verify because of its members' anonymity.


About the Author

Eric Chabrow

Eric Chabrow

Retired Executive Editor, GovInfoSecurity

Chabrow, who retired at the end of 2017, hosted and produced the semi-weekly podcast ISMG Security Report and oversaw ISMG's GovInfoSecurity and InfoRiskToday. He's a veteran multimedia journalist who has covered information technology, government and business.




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