GoDaddy Outage Takes Down Millions Of Sites

Anonymous Member Claims Responsibility

[jgold454]

This has taken down sites that aren't even hosted with godaddy. I have a bunch of sites registered with them and hosted elsewhere and those have been taken down as well. Some are starting to come back intermittently but this is a big one..

[techcrunch.com ]

[J_RaD]

I won't deal with a "support tickets / emails only" registrar or hoster who is not in the same county as I am..

[My] host jumps on support tickets like a bad rash, and the other end isn't that clueless either... and if they are they send you up a lvl quick. I can send them cut and paste tracert stuff and they actually GET IT.

[edited by: Webwork at 1:40 pm (utc) on Sep 11, 2012]
[edit reason] [webmasterworld.com...] [/edit]

[CrashGordon]

I host on Godaddy, but my site uses CloudFlare, so Godaddy's DNS troubles didn't effect the website, but my email was toast for hours.

[Leosghost]

Should have read..

I won't deal with a "support tickets / emails only" registrar or hoster who is not in the same country as I am

it's very very late here, and we ( family ) all just started what feels like very early gastric flu..so my typing is worse than usual ..and the speelchucker thinks that most of what I type in English is wrong anyway..red lines underneath the word "write", every time I write "write" for some weird reason..

And "pyrrhric" in another thread it did not like at all..still doesn't..

[ember]

I feel sorry for the sites that were hit, but I can't stand godaddy, so if it had to happen to someone, might as well be them.

[diberry]

"The complete lack of government response, to me, suggests that they have a role in this. Preparations being made for war with Iran perhaps? A test? A reboot after implementing an underlying system?"

Over the weekend, I was looking for an online alternative to Quicken, which could access my bank accounts and keep everything in one place for me. These types of sites are required to have the same security as banking websites. Out of the 10 banking or financial websites I tried to access over an 8 hour period, SIX went down for unexpected maintenance at one time or another. I couldn't believe that was coincidence, so I figured either something had just happened, or they'd been made aware of something that might happen and been instructed to do something preventative immediately.

I don't know if this is connected, but it does feel like something's brewing.

[incrediBILL]

Out of the 10 banking or financial websites I tried to access over an 8 hour period, SIX went down for unexpected maintenance at one time or another. I couldn't believe that was coincidence, so I figured either something had just happened, or they'd been made aware of something that might happen and been instructed to do something preventative immediately.

Maybe a "down for maintenance" message is how the banks automatically handle DDOS attacks when the network gets shaky and connections start faltering, much like Twitters "Over Capacity" message that I encountered at roughly the same time. Consider the fact that some of these banks might use GoDaddy for some of their domain registrations and/or DNS, something that should make anyone nervous, and then it got hit that all those connections broke and that was the default user friendly message so it didn't scare the crap out of their customers and inadvertently start a mass exodus of people pulling money out of their financial institution ala the first Wall Street crash and the Great Depression.

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar and not a big brown... never mind.

I don't know if this is connected, but it does feel like something's brewing.

Something is definitely brewing and thanks to gutless legislation and whimpering broadband providers nobody is blocking the problem at the source and these botnets are getting bigger and even more powerful as we've just experienced. I'm sure it could be stopped but a lot of surprised customers would be very unhappy if what needs to be done is actually done.

IMO, this is just another example that we're on the brink of the internet equivalent of a 9/11 type event and the broadband providers are still too afraid of hurting their profits, just like the airline industry was with the need to tighten their security, to do what needs to be done for fear of customer backlash before something catastrophic actually happens. Worse case is people think just because they have Norton or whatever installed that they are safe which is about as false a sense of security as the TSA theater in the airports. Any security is obviously better than nothing but botnets with millions of machines prove it's ineffective.

The true irony here is the people running infected machines are usually responsible for this stuff, not Anonymous or anyone else, because they are the ones that were stupid enough to click in the trojan in the email, online or elsewhere and permitted it to be installed just trying to get rid of ED, baldness or to collect that $30M from that nice person in Nigeria with the "business opportunity".

I don't think this was even a serious attack, I think this was just a test to see what kind of impact it would have. When the real thing happens it could impact all major DNS of all registrars at once, or some major hosting companies, the financial industry with banks, Wall Street or both, the infrastructure 'grid' as we all lose power possibly, or something so outrageous we can't even conceive of it until after it actually happens.

Mark my words that something is brewing, it doesn't take a fortune teller to read these cards, but what the final end game is as yet unknown.

[matrix_jan]

but what the final end game is as yet unknown

There aren't many options for final end game... More strict rules for anything that is happening on the web, some organizations controlling the web or some parts of it, etc.

In other words a giant spider is "brewing" for the world wide web.

[lucy24]

Because they are one of only a few big registrars who provide non 800 numbers ( you cant dial 800s into the USA from outside the USA ) and thus can be reached by phone.

I'll be darned. I took a quick detour to see if my own host can be reached by phone. Never did find a phone number, whether 800 or otherwise. But then, er, I got slightly derailed by one of their more visible pages containing no less than three separate BOMs in conjunction with an 8859-1 charset declaration.

That kind of thing can't help but be distracting ;)

Incidentally, GoDaddy's front page currently says

NOTICE... .
At 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT. At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.

They must have been saying it for at least the past hour and a quarter, since they don't give the date.

---

Postscript

40 minutes later: Holy ###, Brett, are you trying to scare us half to death? After posting the above-- plus a few more minutes to fix typos that kept jumping up at me-- I went next door to refresh the Active Posts window. Browser said it couldn't find WebmasterWorld, and continued saying it sporadically for a few minutes before I went off and did something else.

:: mopping brow ::

[bwnbwn]

Might be off topic al little but I assume from all the sites being down my Adsense CPC went through the roof. I was wondering what the heck was going on until I got the news Godaddy was down.

[frontpage]

@ matrix_jan

Anonymous apologists who make excuses for criminal behavior make me laugh. Anonymous claimed credit for the attack on their Twitter feed.

The @Anon_Central Twitter feed, however, may have offered a rationale for going after the company, which last year came under fire for not opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), though GoDaddy eventually reversed course on those stances amidst pressure from the Web.

"By using / supporting Godaddy, you are supporting censorship of the Internet," Anon_Central's curators tweeted.

Crinminal attacks on the interntet affect the little people who are just trying to earn a living and feed their families.

Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach screen-printing business, told the Associated Press that FresnoDogPrints.com and two other sites were down. "We run our entire business through websites and e-mails, so everything's down today," Borg said.

"I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if (the hacker is) going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I don't think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses."

GoDaddy outage impacts millions of hosted sites; Anonymous takes credit
[clarionledger.com...]

[SevenCubed]

Anonymous apologists who make excuses for criminal behavior make me laugh.

Can you explain that in more detail I'm not understanding what you mean there.

[engine]

Godaddy has issued a statement on the outage.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. 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. 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.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

Godaddy Outage: "It was not a hack" [godaddy.com]

[Panthro]

Can one of you smart people please translate "internal network events"?

[matrix_jan]

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS).

et voila... Just what I thought(and said).

@frontpage

I respect your [right of] opinion about the group, but like I mentioned and provided a link to a tweet above, they did not take credit for the attack. Just because someone with a nickname of anon and avatar of Guy Fawkes' mask tweets about something doesn't mean anything. What media covered is called cheap news, no wonder a lot of people bought it.

[diberry]

So Godaddy just doesn't know how to keep their hosting afloat? Well, if they get a mass exodus of customers, at least it will be entirely their fault.

[jecasc]

My guess is that the following happend: This anonymous guy was typing "ping godaddy.com" into his command prompt when someone at godaddy accidently pulled the plug. And then he thought: Wow - I did it. I single handedly took down godaddy with my ping of power! And off he went to twitter to tell the world.

Just like the little boy that thought he caused a blackout by hitting a lamppost with his stick when the lights went out.

[Alcoholico]

on the bright side, with all those GD accounts down, my spam level was at an all time low today.

Same here, I was wondering why.... even got a little bored and missed a little (not too much) those freaking spammers....

[frontpage]

@matrix_jan

And you would be wrong again in your constant defense of this criminal group. Anon is admitting that it was a hack. And the hacker is warning that he will do it again to prove it was not an internal issue.

Hello Citizens of the world, We are Anonymous. Dear brothers and sisters. Now is the time to open your eyes and expose the truth!

It has come to our attention that Go Daddy, an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company has gained the attention of anonymous and the world yesterday as it was experiencing "intermittent outages."

As silly as it seems, many members of anonymous are still puzzled whether it was truly an Anonymous member or a government entity is still unknown. However, many of us have concluded that Go Daddy was taken down because of its support for SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act."

Go Daddy has committed many blatant attempt to destroy the Civil rights of the Ninety Nine percent. Political website that contained stinging criticism of the Obama administration have been removed by Go Daddy because it was, in there words, "maliciously harmful to individuals in the government."

Therefor Anonymous asks the ninety nine percent to boycott Go Daddy and remove there hosting to another domain name servers.

Anonymous would like to point out that Go Daddy who is, currently running millions of sites around the world, is actively putting SOPA, a bill that was petitioned by four point five million people, into effect.

Manchurian Candidate, Barack Hussein Obama, has already committed many acts of destruction against the constitution of the United States claiming it as an "Imperfect document" and he has already signed such unconstitutional bills as NDAA "national defense Authorization Act"and Executive order NDRA "National Defense Resources Preparedness." These bills are violations to our constitutional and civil liberties.

People of the world, Our internet freedom is dwindling because of government tyranny. For the love of all our future and humanity, wake up and open your eyes before the United States of America follows in the footsteps of Communist China.

We are Anonymous.

We are legion.

We do not forgive.

we do not forget.

Expect us.

Source: [pastebin.com...]

And

@AnonymousOwn3r

@bigbearhw ok if you say so I’m not inside their servers lol you will see soon

And

@AnonymousOwn3r

Go daddy souce code and database leaked by @AnonymousOwn3r [t.co...]

Source: [webpronews.com...]

[edited by: frontpage at 9:26 pm (utc) on Sep 11, 2012]

[frontpage]

This is getting interesting.

Anonymous release GoDaddy Database and source code

AnonymousOn3r responsible for the recent GoDaddy outage released Godaddy source code and database

Godaddy that later today said that no DDoS attacks took place today and that the outage issue was technical is proven to have lied.

The hacker posted a link on pastebin that anyone can download the source code and the database

[cylaw.info...]

[moTi]

oh i see, so godaddy is the helpless victim of a cyber attack and lying to the rest of the world in their official statement is just good customer service. haha

[incrediBILL]

They'll wrap it in a bikini or a thong and everyone will forget it happened.

Old Jedi mind trick.

[matrix_jan]

@frontpage

Your naivety brings a smile on my face (no, really, now I'm smiling).

Like I said:

Do your own research.
Don't listen to anyone with a twitter account and an avatar of that mask.

Now regarding your post:
The "hacker" everyone is talking about is no one(you can tell it from the reaction of the groups leading twitter account post). Now to the "leaked database and source code", please take a part of that code and google it, see what you can find and look at THE DATE of your find. This is just a 12 year old kid messing around. Anonymous let everyone know they didn't do it, and now just enjoy the publicity. Others like you (sorry, a fact) naively follow what the kid posts and what the press writes.

It pretty much can be that the kid is somewhat related to the group but the signals(*) show that even if there was an attack it wasn't from the group but from one stupid member.

(*)signals:

kid claims he's the leader. There are no leaders, and such behaviour is not accepted by anyone from the group.
Two major twitter accounts denied the attack and even laughed at the kid.
Godaddy denied the attack even though it would make them come clean after the mess. Nobody's protected from ddos.

Cheers ;)