January 16th, 2009
GoDaddy hit by a DDoS attack
Domain name registrar and web hosting provider GoDaddy.com, was hit by a DDoS attack on Wednesday affecting thousands of its shared hosting customers for several hours. GoDaddy’s Communications Manager Nick Fuller confirmed the attack originally speculated to be an “outage”, and responded to several questions about it.
Q: Was Wednesday’s GoDaddy.com “outage” an actual DDoS attack, and if so, how severe was it?
A: Wednesday, Go Daddy experienced a mutating type of DDOS attack.
Q: Could you provide us with more details on the DDoS attack itself, was it aimed at at disrupting GoDaddy’s entire infrastructure (email, DNS servers) or was it basically attacking GoDaddy.com’s webserver?
A: This attack was aimed at hosting servers.
Q: For how long was GoDaddy.com unreachable on Wednesday, and could you provide us with a rough estimate on the number of affected sites?
A: There was an intermittent service disruption to a small percentage of our hosting customers over a period of hours.
Q: This isn’t the first time that GoDaddy’s been hit with a DDoS attack. Do you attribute this pattern to GoDaddy’s popularity in the sense that unethical competition might be behind the attacks, or perhaps you have a different perspective on who and why attacked the company?
A: It’s our policy not to elaborate on any cyber attack. As you can appreciate, we don’t want to give attackers any information that could benefit them.
- Go through recent DDoS attack incidents - AlertPay hit by a large scale DDoS attack; BBC hit by a DDoS attack; Anti fraud site hit by a DDoS attack; Norwegian BitTorrent tracker under DDoS attack;
This isn’t the first time that GoDaddy is getting DDoS-ed. Similar attacks took place in 2005, and then again in 2007.
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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