Members of the well-known online hacktivist group, Anonymous, have attempted a number of high-profile cyber attacks in the recent past. It seems that the latest to go on the list of their victims is the popular web hosting giant, GoDaddy.
According to the reports that are beginning to trickle in, GoDaddy has been attacked by an Anonymous member who goes by the Twitter handle AnonymousOwn3r. As a result of the attack, millions of GoDaddy-hosted websites are reportedly down. This person says that this is not an attack sanctioned by Anonymous as a group.
The impact of the attack is not confined only to such websites which are hosted by GoDaddy. Even such websites who have their domains registered through GoDaddy are inaccessible. That’s because the attack seems to aim the domain name serve (DNS) that link domains hosted by GoDaddy to servers, including external servers. Apart from the sites, GoDaddy-hosted email accounts and phone services are also down, probably for the same reasons.
According to AnonymousOwn3r, the attack was launched by himself/herself in a personal capacity and that this was done in order to expose the security vulnerability of the web host.
GoDaddy tweeted from its official Twitter account that it was well aware of the situation and was working to resolve it as soon as possible.