GoDaddy employees used in crypto services attacks

 

San Francisco, Nov 22 (IANS): Fraudsters have used employees at Internet names and registrations management major GoDaddy to attack multiple cryptocurrency services over the past one week, said a report.

While GoDaddy acknowledged that "limited" number of GoDaddy employees fell for a social engineering scam, the company did not reveal how the employees were tricked by the fraudsters to make the unauthorised changes required for the attacks, KrebsOnSecurity reported on Saturday.

The attacks led to modifications of "a small number" of customer domain names, according to GoDaddy spokesperson Dan Race who said that the incident was still under investigation, the report noted.

The use of GoDaddy employees in the attacks came to light after cryptocurrency trading platform liquid.com last week reported a security incident that occurred on November 13.

"A domain hosting provider 'GoDaddy' that manages one of our core domain names incorrectly transferred control of the account and domain to a malicious actor," Liquid CEO Mike Kayamori said in a blog post.

"This gave the actor the ability to change DNS records and in turn, take control of a number of internal email accounts. 

In due course, the malicious actor was able to partially compromise our infrastructure, and gain access to document storage."

Liquid said that the malicious actor might have been able to obtain personal information from its user database. 

This may include data such as email, name, address and encrypted password.

"After detecting the intruder we intercepted and contained the attack," Kayamori said.

Several other cryptocurrency services subsequently targeted by the fraudsters, according to the KrebsOnSecurity report.

This type of "social engineering" are becoming increasingly common. Earlier this year, Twitter revealed a massive cryptocurrency hack that compromised several high-profile accounts.

Twitter said that the "social engineering" that occurred on July 15 targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack.