GoDaddy’s hosting was hacked 2.5 months ago!

GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting was hacked and up to 1.2 million customers were exposed.

Email addresses, customer numbers, usernames, passwords and SSL private keys were all exposed.

And somehow GoDaddy either found out about this 2.5 months after the breach or they are just letting people know now or a combination of these.

GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting was rubbish years ago. It seems GoDaddy hosting is a disaster now.

Here is GoDaddy’s blog post from today:

On November 17, 2021, we discovered unauthorized third-party access to our Managed WordPress hosting environment. Here is the background on what happened
and the steps we took, and are taking, in response:

We identified suspicious activity in our Managed WordPress hosting environment and immediately began an investigation with the help of an IT forensics firm and
contacted law enforcement. Using a compromised password, an unauthorized third party accessed the provisioning system in our legacy code base for Managed
WordPress.

Upon identifying this incident, we immediately blocked the unauthorized third party from our system. Our investigation is ongoing, but we have determined that,
beginning on September 6, 2021, the unauthorized third party used the vulnerability to gain access to the following customer information:

  • Up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers had their email address and customer number exposed. The exposure of email
    addresses presents risk of phishing attacks.
  • The original WordPress Admin password that was set at the time of provisioning was exposed. If those credentials were still in use, we reset those
    passwords.
  • For active customers, sFTP and database usernames and passwords were exposed. We reset both passwords.
  • For a subset of active customers, the SSL private key was exposed. We are in the process of issuing and installing new certificates for those customers.

Our investigation is ongoing and we are contacting all impacted customers directly with specific details. Customers can also contact us via our help center
(https://www.godaddy.com/help) which includes phone numbers based on country.

We are sincerely sorry for this incident and the concern it causes for our customers. We, GoDaddy leadership and employees, take our responsibility to protect our
customers’ data very seriously and never want to let them down. We will learn from this incident and are already taking steps to strengthen our provisioning
system with additional layers of protection.

Demetrius Comes
Chief Information Security Officer

Sold.Domains

About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

One comment

  1. I hope all of their customers and GoDaddy themselves, for the investors, fair well during these trying times.

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