Webhost Hacked: Godaddy and Digital Ocean

Web hosting provider Digital Ocean is currently in the process of notifying some customers about a security lapse that exposed some of their account details.

According to an email the company is currently sending out, the security leak occurred due to an internal Digital Ocean document that was mistakenly left accessible online.

Digital Ocean says the document contained several types of user account details.

This included personally identifiable information such as customer email addresses and their respective Digital Ocean usernames, but also account technical details such as the number of droplets (servers) owned by the customer, the user’s bandwidth usage, support or sales communications notes, and the amount of money the customer paid during calendar year 2018.

Digital Ocean said that the internal document was accessed at least 15 times while it was left available online.

The web hosting provider said it did not see any unauthorized access to impacted customers’ servers as a result of this incident.Digital Ocean said the file contained details for less than 1% of the company’s total customer base.

“Our community is built on trust, so we are taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” the company wrote customers.

“We will be educating our employees on protecting customer data, establishing new procedures to alert us of potential exposures in a more timely manner, and making configuration changes to prevent future data exposure.”

Webhost Data Breach Letter

A copy of the email Digital Ocean has been sending customers today is available below.

 

GoDaddy notified some of its customers that an unauthorized party used their web hosting account credentials to connect to their hosting account via SSH.

The security incident that took place on October 19, 2019, was discovered on April 23, 2020, after the company’s security team discovered an altered SSH file in GoDaddy’s hosting environment and suspicious activity on a subset of GoDaddy’s servers.

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar and a web hosting company that provides services to roughly 19 million customers around the world.

Webhost account passwords reset

“The investigation found that an unauthorized individual had access to your login information used to connect to SSH on your hosting account,” GoDaddy revealed in the notification letter sent to affected customers.

The company says that it has not yet found any evidence of the attackers adding or modifying any files on the impacted accounts’ hosting.

Additionally, the company assured the affected users that only their hosting accounts were affected as part of the incident, while their main GoDaddy account was not accessible to the attackers.

“We have proactively reset your hosting account login information to help prevent any potential unauthorized access,” GoDaddy added.

Customers are also advised to conduct an audit of their hosting accounts to make sure that everything is in order.

This incident is limited in scope to your hosting account. Your main GoDaddy.com customer account, and the information stored within your customer account, was not accessible by this threat actor. – GoDaddy

Even though the breach notification letter’s wording doesn’t point to the exact reason behind this incident, GoDaddy’s message and offer of free services show that this was not likely the customers’ fault. 

“On behalf of the entire GoDaddy team, we want to say how much we appreciate your business and that we sincerely regret this incident occurred. We are providing you one year of Website Security Deluxe and Express Malware Removal at no cost,” the letter reads.

“These services run scans on your website to identify and alert you of any potential security vulnerabilities. With this service, if a problem arises, there is a special way to contact our security team and they will be there to help.”

Privacy Ninja’s Advice:

Whenever we report a breach, we highly recommend you guys change your passwords and make sure 2FA is enabled on your accounts.

You guys can also check your webhost email at data breach checking websites like https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Privacy Ninja also provides full consultancy on data privacy as well as online data removal services.

Do also check out our Privacy Course where we teach you how to protect yourself from databreaches be it whether you are a company or individual.

You guys can contact us if you would like to check what we can find about your email accounts. We are not providing checkups for FREE.

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