GoDaddy Hacked, or Just a Technical Glitch?

The huge domain and web hosting service GoDaddy.com was down intermittently for most of the day on Monday. These outages left thousands of web sites offline - not just sites hosted by GoDaddy, but sites that had their domain names registered through GoDaddy as well.

GoDaddy announced today that the outage was not due to a hack, but "a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables"according to Engadget

Despite the assertion that the outage was a technical problem, a hacker that is apparently affiliated with Anonymous has claimed responsibility for the outage, but GoDaddy has not confirmed the problems are due to hacking activity. The hacker calls himself Anonymous Own3r, and has posted some details to his twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r, including the screenshot below.

CNN reports that most web sites were back online by Monday night. Wired News reports that GoDaddy has moved their DNS operations to Verisign, their biggest competitor, in order to get their customers back online as soon as possible. From the Wired article:

According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with antivirus company F-Secure, the move to VeriSign has a simple explanation: “They are moving to name servers which are not under attack,” he said via direct message.

If the outage was due to a technical glitch, this will be the second time in a week that Anonymous has made false claims. Last week Anonymous claimed to have stolen records from an FBI agent that indicate the FBI was tracking Iphones illegally, only to have a small application development firm in Florida assert those records were stolen from them.


Article first published as GoDaddy Hacked, or Just a Technical Glitch? on Technorati.