In a shocking development, GoDaddy, a web hosting behemoth, has informed its customers of a data breach.
The online hosting company admitted that cybercriminals have breached its systems almost seven months ago, in October 2019.
The unauthorised individual gained access to login information that its customers used to connect to Secure Shell (SSH) on their hosting accounts, according to GoDaddy CISO and engineering vice-president Demetrius Comes.
Although the investigation is ongoing, there is no evidence so far about the modifications of files on users’ accounts. Reportedly, all affected accounts have had their credentials reset.
In addition to this, the unauthorised individual has been blocked from GoDaddy systems.
“The GoDaddy breach underlines just how important SSH security is,” Yana Blachman, a threat intelligence specialist at Venafi, said.
“SSH is used to access an organisation’s most critical assets, so it’s vital that organisations stick to the highest security level of SSH access and disable basic credential authentication, and use machine identities instead,” Blachman said, “this involves implementing strong private-public key cryptography to authenticate a user and a system.”
Now, the world’s largest domain registrar will provide a complimentary years’ worth of security and malware removal services for those customers affected owing to data breach.
