Security Advisor
Hacker Taking Credit Where Credit's Not Due
An Anonymous hacker (although not sure if part of Anonymous or just anonymous) was quick to take credit on Monday for the six-hour Web site outages of GoDaddy customers.
In a Twitter message, user Anonymous Own3r (is there anything more annoying the using the letter "3" as an "E"?) said "I'm taking godaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now."
The next day GoDaddy responded that the hacker's story (just like his or her mastery of the English language) had quite a few holes in it.
"It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)," Scott Wagner, GoDaddy's interim CEO, said in an e-mailed statement to CNN. "We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."
Now, it could be that GoDaddy is lying to save face (even though it doesn't need to -- the company said its customers had no outages 99.999 percent of the time). However, I'm more inclined to believe the person who provides an actual name over a lame hacker name. Point goes to Scott Wagner.
In any case, what is the end-game for the credit-stealing hacker? Did he or she think that nobody (especially GoDaddy) would look into the actual cause because we would all be too busy cowering in the light of Anonymous Own3r's hacking prowess?
Sure, it probably got a few extra Twitter hits the last couple of days. But the last time I checked, Twitter views couldn't be cashed in for currency (yet).