# GoDaddy hacked, my train pages went with it



## Mik (Jan 2, 2008)

What did I ever do to Anonymous? And why would they think harming ME would make me more supportive of them?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/10/godaddy-outage-anonymous_n_1871699.html

Yes, I have back-ups for most of it. No, I'm still not amused.


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## lownote (Jan 3, 2008)

If they are hosting your site they will likely have backups for the data


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## Mik (Jan 2, 2008)

The front pages are back, and I think nearly everything else is there. 

Still, it's annoying and if truly a hack, totally unnecessary.


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## Steamer Bill (Nov 22, 2010)

My site is also hosted by GoDaddy. After seeing your email I checked it and found that it would not load. I checked and all of the files were in place, but no go. I deleted and then reloaded the site and it is now working fine.

Thought you might be interested ...

Good Luck with yours.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

You deleted your files on the godaddy server, or just cleared out and reloaded your browser? 

Greg


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## Steamer Bill (Nov 22, 2010)

I deleted on the GoDaddy server and re uploaded them.


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## Randy Stone (Jan 2, 2008)

I heard GoDaddy was having problems today nationwide. 
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/t...ity-990406

GoDaddy says sites are down; hacker claims responsibility 


*This story was updated at 8:10* *p.m. ET.* Web-hosting giant GoDaddy said Monday its customers are experiencing website outages, and a supposed member of the hacking group Anonymous has taken "credit" for the problem.


"Hey all, We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it," said GoDaddy on its Twitter page. The company hosts hundreds of thousands of websites, many of them smaller businesses that rely on GoDaddy.


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

If it is true that a hacker can take all of GoDaddy's servers down - makes one wonder about their IT staff.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

it was the anonymous guys, they are pretty expert...


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## Mike Reilley (Jan 2, 2008)

It's Anonymous...with a capital A....maybe the best hacking group out there cept for the Israelis and our DOD. It's not some "unknowns"...cept they are unknown...to the FBI.


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

I realize that one individual of the Anonymous group * claimed * they hacked into the GoDaddy's servers and brought them down. 

Reason btw was that GoDaddy supports SOPA and PIPA 

But to be able to hack into a server there must have been a security hole somewhere to start with 
And the hacker has to poke around to find it - when anyone tries to access a server over the net, the IT people of the affected server would know about it if they are on the ball. 

This supposedly also affected "millions" of web sites from what I read - that means there must have been quite a number of GoDaddy's servers that were brought down all by one individual. 
I wonder if we will ever find out what really happened - I rather doubt it. 


PS:
I just came across this article which claims this was a DDoS attack.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/g...s-of-sites-go-down-in-registrar-outage-81401/

In my books that is not even a hack.

But it makes the issue even more unnerving - DDoS attacks shouldn't be able bring down a major player like GoDaddy


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

What happened was that the NAMESERVERS at godaddy were hacked... that means that people could not have their domain names resolved. 

Our website was "down" in the estimation of most users... it was still there, it's ip address unchanged (we host it ourselves) BUT the domain name, DNS was hosted through godaddy... 

By using our actual IP addresses, we could still address our servers... but other's could not until they got the addresses from us. 

(yes I know that godaddy hosted web sites went down too, but that was a smaller problem) 

So the millions of domain names hosted by godaddy's name servers were attacked... that's the really big deal. They host many more domain names than web sites. 

That is actually (and hereby proven) easier to do, since they all come from a central database, and does not involve as many servers... 

Also, I don't call DOS attacks a security hole, because, you just overwhelm the hardware's ability to process data until it crashes... very typical type of attack... it's just hardware/firmware that cannot handle an grossly abnormal load, like someone trying to put an entire river into a garden hose... the garden hose is not defective, just never designed to handle it. A fine point, but the solution requires a different answer. 

Greg


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

Posted By Greg Elmassian on 11 Sep 2012 07:56 AM 

Also, I don't call DOS attacks a security hole, because, you just overwhelm the hardware's ability to process data until it crashes... very typical type of attack... it's just hardware/firmware that cannot handle an grossly abnormal load, like someone trying to put an entire river into a garden hose... the garden hose is not defective, just never designed to handle it. A fine point, but the solution requires a different answer. 

Greg 
Greg, if you are referring to my post above.....

I talked about a "security hole" when every article I read including the twitter claim by Anonymous talked about "hacking" into the GoDaddy's servers.

When I posted the PS later about the supposed DDoS attck I specifically mentioned that DDos is not a hack and by inference has nothing to do with a security hole.
I guess I need to spell out the obvious next time.

As to theNAMESERVERS at godaddy being hacked and that causing the problem.......

There are 13 root name servers globally, none of them is hosted by GoDaddy.
So I assume you mean a local GoDaddy name server - I don't understand how that can affect web sites not hosted by GoDaddy like yours. 
If I access your site I sure wouldn't end up uwing GoDaddy's local name server even if the domain was registered with them originally.

Knut


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## Torby (Jan 2, 2008)

Mine too. 



No data was lost or compromised. A DOS attack stopped the name servers from answering requests. 


Godaddy *thought* they were protected from that. Oops. FoxNews reported the guilty party wanted to point out a security problem. Not sure if I believe that.


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## Mik (Jan 2, 2008)

Another annoying thing about the hacker's rationale is that GoDaddy changed their position on SOPA back in JANUARY. I guess if you have an agenda, facts don't always matter? 

I received a nastygram (not from any largescaler) that basically said that since GoDaddy's principles have certain political views, I deserved to be inconvenienced for making the simple economic choice to use their service. 

I have no desire to turn the subject to polytickz, merely to point out it's NOT a valid justification for breaking the law or harming innocent people.-- for either side


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

I was looking for a credible report of what happened rather than FOX news and all the other "generic" news services and came across this: 

Update 
Godaddy has reponded to the outage, revealing that there was no hacking involved. A spokesperson said, "The service outage was not caused by external influences. 

"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. 

"Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and Godaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again." 

The Inquirer (http://s.tt/1n1BO) 

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2204446/godaddy-goes-down


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## lownote (Jan 3, 2008)

Excellent link Knut. It was NOT a hack and not the work of "anonymous:" the entire kerfuffle was based on one tweet from some guy claiming it was the work of "anonymous."


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## krs (Feb 29, 2008)

Well lownote, although I posted the link and the comment, I'm not so sure this is actually true. 
I have no doubt that the Inquirer quoted GoDaddy's "official statement" statement correctly, but is that REALLY what happened. 

Not impossible, I have seen some pretty bad screw ups lately on the data processing side by very large corporations, but if this really was some external attack by whoever, I doubt that GoDaddy would admit that. 
If I was a business hosting with GoDaddy I would seriously consider moving my site to another host the first opportunity I got. 

I can relate to and accept outages due to internal problems, equipment failur, power issues, even programming and configuration issues, but if a large, huge in this case, internet corporation's servers are brought to their knees by any individual, I think there is a problem. 

It'll be interesting what else gets published on this issue over the next few days - I don't think we have heard the end of it yet - even though the issue was relatively short lived, it affected an awful lot of people. 

Knut


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## Randy Stone (Jan 2, 2008)

GoDaddy says it wasn't a Hack 

Per NBC News: 

Web-hosting giant GoDaddy says its service was "fully restored" by 4 p.m. PT Monday, and that despite a purported member of Anonymous taking credit for the outage, it was "not caused by external influences." 

"It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)," wrote Scott Wagner, interim CEO of Go Daddy, in a statement Tuesday, but rather was tied to a "series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. 

"Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again." 

As the company stressed Monday, "At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

I used the term "name servers" incorrectly, but was hoping to get the meaning across to non-technical types. 

My domain is registered at godaddy, so all the nameservers go back to godaddy to know the public address of elmassian.com ... that part was not working. 

Dunno if it was a DOS or their network crashed or whatever. All this part does is serve the public ip address for domain names... it's where my DNS records are kept... the public nameservers use this information. 

so to be clear, the location of elmassian.com is defined at godaddy.com ... but my primary nameserver is not there at godaddy... so elmassian.com kept working... 

others that had their DNS records at godaddy and used godaddy as their primary nameserver got had. 

Bottom line, this part of godaddy is not really compute intensive, and is probably just a few machines.... thus by throwing a lot of requests for domain name resolution at them, probably locked them up... but that's just a guess... 

Basically you did not lose a town, just the directions to it... 

Greg


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## Tom Ruddell (Jan 9, 2008)

Ironic that the Bethlehem Central Railroad has been taken down but its GoDaddy website is still up and working. 

Tom Ruddell
www.gardenrailwayministry.com


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