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GoDaddy hack exposed a million customer passwords

Kevin Murphy, November 24, 2021, 09:04:08 (UTC), Domain Registrars

GoDaddy’s systems got hacked recently, exposing up to 1.2 million customer emails and passwords.

The attack started on September 6 and targeted Managed WordPress users, the company’s chief information security officer Demetrius Comes disclosed in a blog post and regulatory filing this week.

The compromised data included email addresses and customer numbers, the original WordPress admin password, the FTP and database user names and passwords, and some SSL private keys.

In cases where the compromised passwords were still in use, the company said it has reset those passwords and informed its customers. The breached SSL certs are being replaced.

GoDaddy discovered the hack November 17 and disclosed it November 22.

It sounds rather like the attack may have been a result of a phishing attack against a GoDaddy employee. The company said the attacker used a “compromised password” to infiltrate its WordPress provisioning system.

Comes wrote in his blog post:

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

You may recall that GoDaddy came under fire last December for punking its employees with a fake email promising an end-of-year bonus, which turned out to be an “insensitive” component of an anti-phishing training program.

About 500 staff reportedly failed the test.

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