Today’s GoDaddy outage may have been one of the largest web attacks of all time, definitely something interesting to watch unfold (especially since the majority of my clients don’t use GoDaddy). My morning started out normally, I had a meeting around 11:00am or so and by that point I had just about made my way through the plethora of emails I had in my inbox from the weekend. Long story short, about halfway through my lunch meeting I kept noticing emails come across on my iPad so I immediately started going through them after my meeting.
In my inbox there were random reports from clients who host their websites with us (but manage their own DNS / Domains w/ GoDaddy) reporting they couldn’t access their websites. I performed a few tests of my own before responding to make sure that in fact our Pleth servers were all still online, and they were. Next I went to Twitter and saw an almost endless stream of tweets from people saying that their sites were down and that there was an outage at GoDaddy.
Finally once the smoke cleared a little bit we were all able to find out who was behind this attack, @AnonymousOwn3r. If that name sounds familiar to those of you in the tech community, it might be because he’s also brought down some major websites in the past, like the FBI and Facebook. Definitely the “Real Deal” and credible enough to take serious. Early on in the attacks the message he/she kept sending was that they were acting alone and that this wasn’t an Anonymous sanctioned attack. There are some tweets out there to substantiate that claim as well as refute it, so the jury is still out on that one.
https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218207521202177
Okay, so what was the purpose of todays attacks? It appears that there is an organized effort from Anonymous taking place on 10/20 as referenced in the video below. You have to see the video yourself to really understand the entire message of what they are standing up for, I can tell you this, they do take social issues, human rights and internet privacy very seriously. You can learn more about the group, just Google ‘Anonymous’ and you are bound to see their historical timeline of “hactivism”…
Here’s what’s being reported about the GoDaddy outage in USA Today.
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