GoDaddy has recently revealed that it has been hacked.
The web hosting and registration company discovered that an “unauthorized third party” had gained access to its managed WordPress hosting environment. An estimated 1.2 million users have been exposed, leaving their email address and customer number vulnerable, as well as administrator passwords for the two WordPress sites hosted on the platform, plus passwords for sFTPs, databases and SSL private keys.
A statement has been issued, with the document stating that GoDaddy believes the breach first occurred on 6 September 2021, and the investigation is currently ongoing. Demetrius Comes, Chief Information Security Officer, says the company is currently working with law enforcement and a private IT forensics firm. They have been quick to re-establish the relevant credentials and will work with users to issue new SSL certificates. Comes concludes his statement by saying that the company will, perhaps too late, “learn from this incident” and take steps to prevent such a breach from occurring in the future.
This is not the first time GoDaddy has been involved in a breach of its security in recent years. In 2018 an AWS bug exposed the company’s server data, and just in 2020, 28,000 user accounts were known to have been breached by an unauthorized individual. However, the same year GoDaddy was also implicated as part of a hack that took down a number of sites in the cryptocurrency space.
Is this really something that won’t happen again?
Source: Engadget
