Yesterday, September 10th, had the internet world and millions of business owners frustrated and unsure as GoDaddy and millions of their hosted websites went down for five hours. This monumental hack was detrimental as the owners of the businesses in question had nothing to do but sit and wait for GoDaddy’s technicians to resolve the issue over the course of the day. While communication from GoDaddy on the status was given through their Twitter account as time progressed, the frustrated millions could do nothing to change their situation.
Some business owners commented on the effects the hack had on their business. Kenneth Borg, who runs a screen printing business in California, told the press that the attack had led to clerks being forced to use their personal email addresses during the outage, causing an “administrative headache”. This attack is classified as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service), revealing that GoDaddy had poor cyber security in place for itself, which in turn, led to poor cyber security for all its customers.
When large-scale attacks like this occur, it causes everyone to take a look at their own situation, whether they were affected or not. For customers of ManageWatch who use OpenDNS, the effect of the GoDaddy hack had minimal impact due to use of their new SmartCache feature that is simple and extremely effective.
How it works: When an authoritative DNS provider suffers an outage (GoDaddy in this case), all of the Web sites they provide service to are taken offline; they’re inaccessible to everyone on the Internet. But not for OpenDNS users. Their servers immediately look for the last known good address for the site in their cache, and use that to load the site. So, effectively, OpenDNS users will be able to access Web sites that appear down for everyone else.
This type of proactive management and forethought on the business owner’s part is precisely geared towards a problem of this nature. At ManageWatch this proactive mindset is present in everything we do, and every service we provide to our clients. Managing the heartbeat of their business and giving business owners the safety and peace of mind they deserve.