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

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