The world’s largest domain registrar was hacked several years ago, but no one knew about it

GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, was hacked by hackers several years ago, but no one knew about it until now. According to representatives of the web hosting giant GoDaddy, the attack by unknown attackers has only just been discovered.

The hackers stole the source code and installed malware on the company’s servers. «Based on our investigation, we believe that these incidents are part of a multi-year campaign conducted by a group of hackers who, among other things, installed malware on our systems and obtained parts of the code associated with certain services at GoDaddy,» the company, which supports about 60 million domain names in the largest first-level domain zones, said in a statement.

GoDaddy representatives reported that in December last year, they received many complaints about redirects from client sites hosted by GoDaddy to phishing pages. Later it turned out that this was due to unauthorized access by a third party to servers hosted by cPanel.

Hackers carry out phishing attacks by posing as trusted sources to gain access to confidential data. Phishing is often used to steal cryptocurrency. A few days ago, the owners of the MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet faced a phishing email due to the compromise of the Namecheap domain provider.