Thanks to an Anonymous hacker, GoDaddy experienced a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. TTAG’s DNS record is held by GoDaddy’s servers. When they go down, we go down. GoDaddy is working as fast as they can to fix the issue. Thanks to DNS’s resilient nature, some people are seeing us as completely down while others can reach the site. Hopefully, we’ll be back to full strength soon. Meanwhile, thanks for your patience and patronage.

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33 COMMENTS

  1. You should consider dropping GoDaddy for there continued undermining of privacy and net neutrality efforts and gov’t spying cooperation.

  2. GoDaddy sucks. They became dead to me after their steadfast support of SOPA.

    Anyway, site works fine from my end.

  4. As someone who works in this field any provider can be taken down by a major group like Anonymous those pricks can take done pretty much anyone. The only way to gard agaist something like this is to spread the load. Spread your resource around as much as you can but that cost to doing it right is high and generally not worth it unless you have a really good reason to do so. AKA the gun nuts go after you on a regualar bases and you need to spend the extra to keep yourself on the air.

    Thanks
    Robert

  5. It’s funny because this site, and two others that I was using heavily today all went down. So I got almost nothing done.

  6. Sorry to hear about that, TTAG. I hope your hackers get hit with a spyder bot virus that cripples their system.

  8. I usually don’t take kindly to punks who shut down websites for kicks, but all my friends who are computer science majors unanimously agree that Anonymous is not a group to be fvcked with.

    • Nope if it was truly Anonymous. We went through a security audit due to threats from an Anonymous related group. Spent thousands of dollars and really long nights for everyone here.
      Good to see we are back on the air! It effected thousands of customers not just TTAG. I am sure over the coming days the scope will become known.

      If it was truly anonymous then there should be a video due on on Youtube about it shortly. That is how they operate.

  10. I was smashing my face against the keyboard trying to figure out why this was the only site I couldn’t access. Glad I wasn’t the only one.

  11. As soon as I figured out we couldn’t resolve DNS to their site, I knew it was a bigger problem. Then sure enough other sites had issues as well. I verified it wasn’t internal but dang they did a nasty one. I am surprised they don’t look for hijacked packets on the DNS ports. Particularly if you start getting flooded with malformed packets.

    • Rack space = where the website/server is physically located.
      DNS = telling our computers how to connect to server.

      Someone with more IT expertise and less “forking around with computers for 25 years” can correct and/or elaborate.

      • You can have almost anybody host for you. You can even host for yourself. BUT… if all you got is the magic numbers…. like 50.57.202.110, all you got is an IP address, (IPv4 to be exact) A DNS server takes a given name like thetruthaboutguns.com and associates it with the IP address. When your computer goes to the address that is a name, it don’t know it, so it talks to a DNS server and asks where that’s at, in which case the DNS server says it’s at the following IP address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx And then your browser (or whatever) goes there. (the www. part usually indicates you want a web server, and tells the browser, DNS server, and the destination server what kind of service or “port” is wanted.)

        Hope this is clearer than mud.

      • You’re spot on. Think about DNS like a telephone book for computers.

        There’s not a good reason to choose just one DNS provider. It’s not much traffic, even for a busy site to have second tier DNS servers, or even third or fourth tier. It’s just more availability of your entries in the phone book.

        That’s my $0.02. If any TTAG readers (or admins) want a more technical brief about DNS, feel free to ask. I have plenty of experience.

  14. You guys should consider a real web publishing budget and hire people accordingly to deal with such things. In this day and age there’s really no reason not to be distributing load geographically and handling DNS in a more sane method than “point it at the web host’s servers and hope for the best”.

    At the very least, consider using something like cloudflare.

    • Considering the overall budget seems to mostly come out of pocket (mostly RF’s), I’d say cost is a likely reason.

  15. The report on NBC was that credit was claimed by a sole hacker who is an Anoymous member, but who stated that this was not an Anon attack. What his motivation is is unknown. Seems personal. Go Daddy was the target, and he got b*tch slapped by the on-line community for messing with so many small businesses who use Go Daddy to host their sites.

    • I was really wondering about that. On the surface, this didn’t seem like Anon’s style. Usually, they have a reason, whether it be not-so-subtle protests over politics or someone messing with cats. Usually, anyway. Funny how a bunch of anonymous hackers with anarchist tendencies don’t always coordinate their activities…or have a reason.

  16. “Thanks to an Anonymous hacker, GoDaddy experienced a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack”

    There is but one solution. The ancient tried and true way:
    Cry Havoc! and let slip the Dogs of War.

  18. Thanks for explaining what happened, I was a little surprised at the outages today, as your site has been rock solid for me since you got the issues settled the last time. Keep up the good work!

  19. I think hackers should be pulled into the street and shot. Then let the bodies rot there. I’m not really proud of myself for this thought process.

  20. GoDaddy just admitted that there was no hacking at all, but an “internal error” that brought down so many sites.

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