GoDaddy and its reported 48 million domain names were hit with what is reported as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by a single member of Anonymous, “AnonymousOwn3r”. While the extent of the outage is not known, its effects are clearly pretty extensive and still being experienced.

@GoDaddy 1:04 PM – 10 Sep 12 :
Update: Still working on it, but we’re making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.

A series of tweets have played out the assumed responsibility by AnonymousOwn3r, and in one of the messages he states:

I’m taking godaddy down bacause well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now.

The scenario points out a major sore point regarding the vulnerability of the internet. The DNS system has been long exposed as a weak point. Whether by human error,  or by malicious attack, the hierarchical system of public servers that resolve common names to IP addresses has been the crux of a number of outages. It is particularly disturbing that this particular attack, now hours old, was allegedly executed by a lone hacker. The type of attack purportedly executed against this target was DDOS, which unleashes a malicious flood of traffic and requests at a target. There is little in the way of effective protection to a DDOS attack, as the source of the attack is distributed by nature, and very hard to track down or filter out.