GoDaddy has disclosed another cybersecurity incident and the company believes the attack was part of a multi-year campaign conducted by a sophisticated threat actor.
In a statement published last week on its website, the hosting giant said a small number of customers complained in early December 2022 about their websites being intermittently redirected. An analysis showed the redirects occurring on apparently random sites hosted on GoDaddy’s cPanel shared hosting services. The redirects were difficult to reproduce.
Further analysis revealed that hackers had breached servers in the company’s cPanel shared hosting environment and installed malware that caused customer websites to intermittently redirect their visitors.
“We 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,” GoDaddy said.
In a 10-K report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the hosting company said it believes this and other attacks were part of a multi-year campaign conducted by a sophisticated threat actor that — among other things — installed malware on its systems and obtained source code associated with some of its services.
The same SEC form includes a brief description of previously disclosed incidents that appear to be part of the same campaign. One of them came to light in May 2020, after GoDaddy discovered that the hosting login credentials of 28,000 customers — as well as the credentials of some employees — had been compromised.
GoDaddy also mentioned a November 2021 incident where a compromised password was used to access a provisioning system linked to Managed WordPress services. This hack impacted 1.2 million customers across several GoDaddy brands.
“To date, these incidents as well as other cyber threats and attacks have not resulted in any material adverse impact to our business or operations, but such threats are constantly evolving, increasing the difficulty of detecting and successfully defending against them,” GoDaddy explained in the SEC report.
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