Our customers and GoDaddy’s hack

If you are a Joker Media customer, you may have some concern about a recent hack of GoDaddy servers. If you haven’t heard the news, here is a summary:

(CBS News) GoDaddy, the domain registrar and Web hosting company, is down, perhaps taking millions of websites down as a result.

A quick call to the company’s customer service line resulted in this voice message:

“If you are having a problem with your email, we are aware of the problem.”

TechCrunch reports that GoDaddy email addresses are down, as well. The blog suggests customers concerned with that their site has been affected can check online status at Down For Everyone Or Just Me.

Twitter accounts claiming to be associated with the hacking group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack.

GoDaddy was the target of protests after it was discovered that the company supported unpopular bills the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).

GoDaddy did not immediately respond to CBS News’ request for comment.

So what does this mean for you? Hopefully, not much, but here are some scenarios:

[+] You (or we) purchased your domain name through GoDaddy

If this is the case, your site should be functioning normally since it is housed on our servers. GoDaddy sells domain names AND actually hosts them (meaning they have big boxes called servers and they hold all of your websites pictures, text, etc.) Think of it as a storage unit you rent. You need space for your stuff, so you rent the space. And you have to pay them to house it for you. Since you pay us to ‘host’ your content, you’re not affected. The breach affected a system called DNS and Nameservers. It’s lingo explaining how information is routed from network to network.

If I’m sitting at my desk and type your website address, I am requesting information. A signal follows your domain address to GoDaddy computers and finds that your content is housed on our servers, so it shoots it to our ‘big boxes’. GoDaddy is having problems with hackers who gummed up their servers and content held within. So that’s the good news for now.

Also, that means your email is fine. You won’t have any email issues unless you are hosted with GoDaddy.

[+] You host your website on GoDaddy’s servers

If you decided to keep a previous hosting plan with GoDaddy instead of moving it to Joker Media’s servers, you may not have service at this point. Many websites hosting on GoDaddy’s servers have been affected by the breach, so for now, it’ll be a waiting game to see when your site will come back up. We can’t do anything on our end to expedite the process.

[+] You sell products on your website and use an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

Many of our clients sell products on their website. If you strictly use PayPal to manage the payments, you’re not affected by this breach. If not, you may be affected.  In order for our company to make sure your product purchase system is secure and safe (the way we want it, right?!), we install what’s called an SSL – a security certificate the encodes information passed back and forth during the transactions. GoDaddy sells these certificates and we have purchased them in the past. So this will be a case-by-case basis. You may experience an outage if you have a GoDaddy SSL. If you’re concerned about it or are noticing any issues, please contact us and we’ll look into it right away.

We are still looking into other aspects of this recent breach and will have some more information as it becomes available.

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Josh Benson

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