The hacking group known as Anonymous, or one of its operatives, duped much of the technology sector into believing it was responsible for an outage at GoDaddy this week. But the company says the outage was due to an internal routing error and had nothing to do with hacking or the infamous global group.
On Monday, GoDaddy users faced intermittent outages from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. PT. Most users were affected for about four hours.
It also affected many small business users. GoDaddy.com hosts more than five million websites. It also is known as a domain name provider.
“The service outage was not caused by external influences,” Go Daddy CEO Scott Wagner said in a company statement. “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.”
Image via Shutterstock
“Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com,” he added. “We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.”
No user data was ever at risk and no systems were compromised.
“We have let our customers down and we know it,” he said. “We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.”
This is not the first time hackers have taken credit for something they didn't do. Last week, a hacking group released a file which they claimed included some one million ID numbers of Apple mobile devices they allegedly hacked from the FBI. But the data was stolen from a company in Florida.
Even with the company’s explanation for the outage, there were some skeptics posting comments on HackerNews.
“I find this extremely suspicious,” said druid. “Someone is lying here in my opinion. I hope I'm proven wrong because this is a terrible excuse for the company to make.”
But another commenter said, “More than likely high traffic crashed one or more routers (THIS I have seen happen) and the live/saved configs didn't match.”
Even though the company denies the outage came from an outside attack, such threats continue to exist.
Imperva reported in July that Web apps are often attacked 274 times a year. Some targets are even attacked 292 days a year, or close to 80 percent of the time. SQL injection (SQLi) is the most frequently used attack.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
