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Emerging Cybersecurity Technologies: What You Need to Know - A Dark Reading
March 23 Virtual Event | <GET YOUR PASS>
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Black Hat USA 2022 Attendee Report | Supply Chain & Cloud Security Risks Are Top
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4 MIN READ

News



WHAT GODADDY'S YEARS-LONG BREACH MEANS FOR MILLIONS OF CLIENTS

The same "sophisticated" threat actor has pummeled the domain host on an ongoing
basis since 2020, making off with customer logins, source code, and more. Here's
what to do.
Nate Nelson
Contributing Writer, Dark Reading
March 02, 2023
Source: GoDaddy
PDF


For years, the domain registrar and Web hosting company GoDaddy has experienced
a cyber barrage of extraordinary scale, it has confirmed — affecting both the
company and its many individual and enterprise clients.



As described in its 10K filing for 2022, released Feb. 16, the company has been
breached once every year since 2020 by the same set of cyberattackers, with the
latest occurring just last December. It's worth also mentioning that the company
has been the subject of earlier cyber incursions as well. The consequences to
GoDaddy are one thing, but, more notably, the breaches have led to data
compromises for more than 1 million of the company's users.

That may well be the key to why the bad guys keep coming back. Because of the
nature of its business, GoDaddy is a connecting link to millions of businesses
around the world. As Brad Hong, customer success lead at Horizon3ai puts it:
"This is the equivalent of your landlord's office being left unlocked, giving a
bad actor access to the keys to your house."


GODADDY'S THREE-HEADED BREACH

While the world was coming to grips with COVID-19, thousands of GoDaddy
customers had a second problem on their hands. In March 2020, the company
discovered that an attacker had compromised the login details for a small number
of their employees, as well as 28,000 of their hosting customers.



It was a harbinger of worse things to come.



In November 2021, a threat actor got their hands on a password that allowed them
access to Managed WordPress, GoDaddy's hosting platform for building and
managing WordPress sites. This case touched 1.2 million Managed WordPress
customers.

There was yet more. In a statement published alongside its 10K, GoDaddy shared
details of yet a third compromise.

"In early December 2022, we started receiving a small number of customer
complaints about their websites being intermittently redirected," the company
said. It turned out that an attacker had breached and planted malware on the
company's hosting servers for cPanel, a control panel program for Web hosts.
This malware intermittently redirected users from the websites they intended to
visit, to malicious sites.

In their statement, the company claimed to "have evidence, and law enforcement
has confirmed, that this incident was carried out by a sophisticated and
organized group targeting hosting services like GoDaddy. According to
information we have received, their apparent goal is to infect websites and
servers with malware for phishing campaigns, malware distribution, and other
malicious activities."




THE SUPPLY CHAIN PROBLEM WITH HOSTING SERVICES

According to Domain Name Stat, GoDaddy is far and away the largest domain name
registrar on the Internet, capturing more than 12% market share with its nearly
80 million registered domains. Scale, alone, would make it an attractive target
for cyberattacks, but being a hosting service makes this a whole other animal.

"GoDaddy and other Web hosting sites are prime targets for adversaries looking
to conduct supply chain attacks," says Allie Roblee, intelligence analyst at
Resilience. A company may take care to implement strong security practices and
software, shunting phishing attacks, and patching up software bugs, yet still be
vulnerable through a trusted provider like their Web hosting service. "Breaching
large service providers like GoDaddy allows adversaries to compromise
organizations and individuals they may have been unable to get into directly."

Of course, once attackers get in through the side entrance, they can do anything
from stealing credentials to dropping malware, redirecting users to malicious
sites, planting backdoors for later use, and much more. But "the implications
for these compromises go even beyond that of security," Hong warns.

Consider an innocent person who intends to visit a business's website, but
instead ends up redirected to a malicious site. Would that person ever risk
visiting that business' website again? This, Hong points out, "hurts the
reputation and operations of thousands, if not millions, of legitimate
businesses."

Beyond that, there's a broader cost. "Weak security at this vendor level
additionally allows attackers to force multiply their ability to carry out
whatever objective they wish to," he explains. Such compromises "not only
provide them with rich PII and private key data intelligence, but also an
extensive network of websites and servers to do their bidding — similar to an
IoT botnet, but instead of multiplying traffic, it multiplies the chances of
successfully carrying out attacks which rely on humans as a weakness."


WHAT GODADDY CUSTOMERS CAN DO

If it didn't end that first or second time, how likely is it that the campaign
against GoDaddy is over now? "It's possible," Roblee warns, "that the attackers
still have access to GoDaddy's infrastructure or have the capability to find
vulnerabilities in the stolen source code they can exploit to regain access."

For that reason, she says, "customers should audit any recently changed or
uploaded files on their website to ensure that malware has not been installed.
Additionally, I would recommend checking historical DNS records to see if any of
their domains had been temporarily redirected."

Hong's advice is even simpler. "Affected businesses should change everything!"
including all potentially affected login credentials, "and especially
deprecating and creating fresh SSL private keys if using them."

Preventative measures will be more necessary going forward than ever before. As
GoDaddy assessed in their 10K, the risk of attack "is likely to increase as we
expand the number of cloud-based products we offer and operate in more
countries."

GoDaddy declined to comment for this article beyond its published statement when
contacted by Dark Reading.

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