Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy
Just a little router trouble, that's all
Domain registrar GoDaddy has commented on the daylong DNS outage that downed many of its customers' websites on Monday, saying that not only was a hacker not responsible, but that the service interruption wasn't the result of a DDoS attack at all.
"The service outage was not caused by external influences," Scott Wagner, the company's interim CEO, wrote in a canned statement. "At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."
On Monday, a hacker using the Twitter handle AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the outage, saying he was attacking GoDaddy's DNS servers "to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons i can not talk now [sic]."
Not true, says GoDaddy. Instead, the downtime was caused by "a series of network events that corrupted router tables." The company says that it has since corrected the problems that triggered the outage and has implemented measures to prevent a similar event from happening again.
During the outage, GoDaddy shifted its own DNS servers to competitor VeriSign, Wired reports, so that the GoDaddy.com domain would remain online. But GoDaddy customer websites remained inaccessible for around six hours in all, beginning at around 10.00 Pacific time (17.00 GMT/18.00 BST) and ending around 16.00 Pacific (23.00GMT/24.00BST).
"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999 per cent uptime in our DNS infrastructure," Wagner wrote. "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."
The hacker collective known as Anonymous was quick to distance itself from AnonymousOwn3r's claims, with several Anonymous-affiliated Twitter feeds denying that the group had anything to do with taking down GoDaddy.
On Tuesday, Twitter feeds were alive with speculation about the incident, with many accusing AnonymousOwn3r of fabricating his story. Others, however, were unsatisfied with GoDaddy's explanation:
Not sure I buy GoDaddy's story. Cascading Router TCAM issue causing DNS outage? Does not compute. Not validating @anonymousown3r #justsayin
— Jonnie Dangerously (@antagonisthero) September 11, 2012
AnonymousOwn3r himself maintains that he was solely responsible for the outage, and that GoDaddy is covering up his attack because it doesn't want to reveal how weak its security really is. At this juncture, he is reportedly mulling ways to prove his credibility. ®
I think i will have to bring down godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack.
— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) September 11, 2012
COMMENTS
Re: Again...
An anonymous commenter says that anonymous lies? Who are you trying to kid?
Not hacked, just naughty IT
According to my source*, the cause of the outage was a mis-communication with the IT dept., which had been outsourced to an Indian company, which had outsourced the contract to the Phillipines, which had outsourced the contract to Slovenia, which had outsourced the contract to Mexico, which, in turn, had outsourced the contract to 8 year old Billy Waterspoon of England, who currently isn't allowed to use the computer because he was fighting with his sister.
Go Daddy expects all services back to normal by Friday, when Billy's punishment is over, unless it's extended because Billy won't eat his greens.
*Pulled from my ass.
Well, I've never been a custo^H^H^H^H^H victim of GoDaddy, but from all the complaints I've seen over the years, they must be the world's only ISP with a credibility rating in negative numbers.
While I'm not at all convinced that the Anon. claimant is telling the truth, I'm even less convinced that the outage was not the result of some form of crack.
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