The cybersecurity blog Krebs on Security reported Saturday that hackers managed to fool employees at the well-known web hosting company into briefly kneecapping a couple of cryptocurrency trading websites. These included Liquid and NiceHash, which confirmed separate attacks over the span of just a few days earlier in November.
The Krebs on Security post gets into all the nitty-gritty technical details, but basically whoever was behind these attacks managed to convince GoDaddy employees to hand over control of Liquid’s and NiceHash’s domains for some tomfoolery. In NiceHash’s case, email traffic was redirected without authorization from the site’s managers and user funds had to be frozen for 24 hours.
Luckily, it doesn’t seem like any personal info or other compromising data was stolen during these breaches, nor was it confirmed exactly how the hacks took place. One prominent theory is that the attackers used voice phishing, or vishing, a technique in which hackers use phone calls to trick companies into handing over the keys to people with malicious intent.
GoDaddy was the victim of a large vishing scheme back in March. Several domains came under hacker control during that particular attack.
The fact that a domain registrar as large and established as GoDaddy can fall victim to something as seemingly simple as dishonest phone calls is a sure sign that nothing is safe, no matter how safe you think it might be. Remember folks, always set up two-factor authentication to protect your data.