GoDaddy hosting accounts were breached by an anonymous entity

GoDaddy the largest domain hosting provider with more than 19 million customers has now notified a substantial amount of its customers that an anonymous entity had breached into their hosting accounts using the compromised credentials through SSH. This breach had occurred on October 2019, right after the security team of GoDaddy identified mysterious behavior in their servers.

After analyzing the breach the security professionals have identified an unauthorized individual had gained access to the login credentials through the SSH on the victim’s hosting account. However, the attackers have not modified any files or folders within the affected hosting accounts, and also promised that the attack has affected only the hosting accounts and not their main account. 

How is GoDaddy reacting?

The company has reset all the hosting account login credentials as a proactive measure to secure the rest of the accounts and prevent further exploitation. Furthermore, the company has requested its customers to verify and audit their hosting accounts to ensure that their account has not been breached yet. Albeit, the incident and the concern that the same has created among the customers, GoDaddy is now offering their Website Security Deluxe and Express Malware Removal program for free. 

The above two programs runs scans on your website to detect and warn you of any potential vulnerabilities. With this additional security and assistance from GoDaddy’s security team, the customers will find a sense of relief over their hosting.

This firm has had several security issues in the past, scammers made use of compromised accounts to build 15,000 new subdomains, impersonating popular websites. Also, in the year 2019 GoDaddy was identified of injecting a Java script into US client websites, thus affecting their site’s performance. The same script was later used for monitoring websites, data collection, and more. 

Users are yet to receive a complete fix and update from GoDaddy to avoid any such credential breaches in future, meanwhile the customers can reset their passwords, strengthen them, and update them in every 60 days to stay immune to data breaches.