The confederacy of malicious hackers known as Anonymous brought down websites across the globe yesterday, including MassDevice.com, when 1 of its members brought down the massive web host called GoDaddy.com.
The GoDaddy site was down for several hours yesterday, along with an untold number of sites owned by its 10.5 million customers, according to the New York Times.
Responsibility for the "distributed denial-of-service" attack that crippled GoDaddy’s servers with a barrage of traffic was claimed by Twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r.
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"When I do some DDoS attack, I like to let it down by many days," the hacker said on Twitter. "It can last one hour or one month."
"This person said that he had conducted the attack alone and that it was not part of a broader Anonymous campaign," according to the Times.
GoDaddy drew the ire of the hackers collective last year when it initially supported the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have allowed copyright owners to take sites offline for practicing or aiding piracy. The web host backed off of its support for the measure after hackers threatened to attack and customers moved their sites to other hosts.
Yesterday, "1 of the Twitter accounts most frequently associated with Anonymous, @AnonyOps," said the GoDaddy hack was the work of a lone wolf.
"He’s either a newbie to activism and cutting his teeth by doing this, which is misguided, or he’s trying to give Anons a bad reputation," @AnonyOps told the Times via private Tweet.
Here at MassDevice.com, our site was inaccessible for several hours yesterday afternoon. We were unable to post new content during that period. We apologize for any inconvenience.