The Anonymous Lies Keep Building - GoDaddy and Apple

UPDATE 9/11/2012: Anonymous Own3r is a fraud.  The GoDaddy outage was caused by an internal router issue, and not a hacking or denial of service attack. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: As of writing this article, "Anonymous Own3r" has not provided proof that he/she was responsible for this attack.

Earlier this year I wrote about an Anonymous plan to take down the internet through a massive Denial of Service attack against the root DNS servers, and how to take steps to avoid being affected.  However, this attack never impacted anyone.

Today a member of the group Anonymous, who goes by "Anonymous Own3r" claimed responsibility for knocking GoDaddy's DNS servers offline.  According to the hacker fraudster, he/she acted alone in this attack, and it was not assisted by the Anonymous collective.  However, no explanation has yet been posted as to how he/she took down GoDaddy's DNS servers further investigation reveals that Anonymous Own3r is a fraud, and was not responsible.

This revelation comes on the same day that it was revealed that leaked Apple device IDs were from a US company BlueToad, instead of the FBI, as Anonymous has claimed.

According to Netcraft.com the GoDaddy outage lasted approximately 3.25 hours, and affected eight out of GoDaddy's ten hosting locations.

While the percentage of the Internet affected by this attack is not clear, what is clear is that the thousands of web sites and email servers hosted by GoDaddy went dark today during business hours, wreaking havoc on businesses relying on GoDaddy for their web and email presence.

Does your Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan include massive outages by your hosting provider?  If not, now would be a good time to add it, especially if your organization relies on web and email for your critical business functions.

Related Reading:
Solution Brief: Disaster Recovery
Pre-Testing Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
Recent Lessons in Disaster Recovery

Mission Critical (FREE Subscription!)

Warning: CaffeineSecurity dotcom is not mine!

Just a warning to everyone, there was a recent registration of CaffeineSecurity.com

This site is NOT me.

The domain was registered by proxy, so it's hard to tell who might actually own it.

How to Mitigate Anonymous' Internet Shutdown March 31

In case you haven't heard, Anonymous plans to shutdown the internet March 31 to protest a multitude of issues which I'm not going to bother to get into right now.

The plan is to attack all 13 root DNS servers with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

By shutting down all 13 root DNS servers, a domino effect will be felt throughout the internet and eventually all DNS queries will begin to time out.

Their plan is pretty bold, and will require a tremendous number of computer systems attacking at once.

While it is unknown if Anonymous' plan can succeed, there are a few things you can do to mitigate this threat from affecting your organization.

1) Don't panic. This shutdown is on a Saturday, so the number of employees this affects will be minimal.  If your organization isn't even open on Saturdays, then this won't affect your organization at all.

2) If you are open on Saturday, consider putting one of your local DNS servers in caching mode if it isn't already, and increase the DNS caching time to live (TTL) to 86400 seconds (24 hours).  Any commonly used sites should remain cached throughout the attack.  It's a good idea to revert to your original settings Monday morning.

3) Finally, if you absolutely must have access to certain websites with static IP addresses, such as business partners or suppliers, consider making available to your on-call support staff a hosts file with critical domain names and IP addresses pre-loaded, so that they can drop this file on any organizational systems which start to have DNS problems.  Once again, revert to your original settings Monday morning.

These three simple tips should help keep your organization up and running, should Anonymous actually succeed in taking down one or more root DNS servers.

For home users, I would recommend checking your local weekend weather forecast Friday evening.  If it's going to be nice out, be ready to go outside for a change, get some exercise and have some fun.  If not, consider breaking out some board games for the kids, or find yourself a nice book to read.  It's only one day, if it even happens, and it's not the end of the world.