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Millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy went down today from 2pm EST to around 7pm EST due to a DNS service outage.   A hacker using the “Anonymous Own3r” Twitter account claimed credit for the outage.

Three of GoDaddy’s DNS (Domain Name System) servers failed to resolve as a result of the attack.  The inaccessibility of GoDaddy’s DNS servers specifically CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET, CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET, and CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET are the cause of the outage.  For the vast majority of clients hosting with GoDaddy, the DNS issue wasn’t fixable because GoDaddy holds all the MX records for these sites, and users usually have to log into the GoDaddy site in order to switch DNS providers.

Anonymous online activist collective who has boasted of causing the outage with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).   AnonymousOwn3r purportedly perpetrated the attack on his own saying, “the attack is not from Anonymous [collective], the attack it’s coming only from me”.

Last year GoDaddy was pressured by Reddit activists following the transfer of tens of thousands of domain names from GoDaddy to other companies.  The company has been the center of a few other controversies.  The Wikimedia Foundation famously moved away from GoDaddy after the non-profit group protested months earlier in opposition of SOPA by blacking out its entire English-speaking website for 12 hours.

However, despite speculation that this could be connected to the previous support for SOPA, AnonymousOwn3r said: “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will understand because I did this attack. I’m taking godaddy down because well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that I cannot talk now,” the hacker said in another tweet.

GoDaddy is back up and released a statement saying at no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.  Making customers feel happy and safe that the service was back up and information was kept safe.

Update to Story:

Anonymous Own3r said,” I am using thousands of Hacked server as bots to perform the attack. Sending dos attack commands using IRC to all of them together. I just upload IRC connect on each server to control my every slave by commands.”

Using a DDOS IRC Bot script, available on Pastebin. It’s really easy to use, hack randomly hundreds of Servers online and upload your Script. Now just via IRC you can control your slaves to perform a huge DDOS attack.

Anonymous Own3r also said “when i do some DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack i like to let it down by many days , the attack for unlimited time, it can last one hour or one month.”