Go Daddy or Go Mommy and Freak Out!!

Today has been one of those Mommy kind of Monday's, when you settle down with your cup of favorite java and realize that your TMN chapter will not come up!! You hit the refresh button, you text message your mommy friends and your worst fears are true. The Mommies Network is down!!! Ahhhhhhhh Ooooooo, Ekkkkkk what will you do, be forced to clean the house, do the laundry, go to the grocery store, the horror! Facebook!! that's what you will do, head to Facebook and see what is going on with TMN. The discovery is that some darling of a geek nut job has hacked into GoDaddy's entire DNS infrastructure.........ummm what on earth does that mean? And what does it have to do with MY Mommy site! Well the best way that we can describe it is that because our TMN servers (the thing that makes our mommy sites run smooth and care free),our websites hosting and domain names have links with the Go-Daddy DNS infastructure.
DNS is the service that allows us to just type in the wording for a website and not just the numerical IP address for...themommiesnetwork.org or which ever local chapter you are a member of and you are automatically taken to to page you intended to view. With GoDaddy and their DNS down, every part of the company including every registered domain name that links to a website somewhere else is now unreachable." Including all the TMN sites.
Here is what happened and who we can give our evil mommy stares to now.

To @AnonymousOwn3r Evil look from your Mommy

Credit to the examiner.com for the information :
Anonymous is the collective of hackers that call themselves hacktivists. They don't take down websites to steal information. They do it to prove a point. Today one of their members struck GoDaddy and took the entire DNS infrastructure down. DNS is the service that allows you to type www.examiner.com instead of 67.220.220.5 (the IP address for examiner.com). With GoDaddy and their DNS down, every part of the company including every registered domain name that links to a website somewhere else is now unreachable
The point was made that this is not from the Anonymous collective, but rather one individual within the organization. His name on Twitter is @AnonymousOwn3r and he has made it quite clear this was his idea and action and it could go on for as long as he wants. He does get shy about his true reasons for performing this act other than to show GoDaddy where their security is lacking.

In the past, the general public has rallied around Anonymous and agreed with their actions for the greater good of the Internet. This time it is different. GoDaddy has not intrinsic value to people. It is a domain registrar and host. That means that all of GoDaddy's business revolves around the creation and existence of other websites. When that company does down, it takes all of the websites of its customers with it. This time Anonymous has negatively affected the very people it claims it is standing up for. And the Internet community is not happy. The Twitter feed for @AnonymousOwn3r is filling up with people making comments like, "You made your point, now end this" or "I support you but you're targeting small businesses this time."

Naturally, these hackers are not sensitive to the plight of Americans if it doesn't serve their cause. They believe in their actions and will stop at nothing. There is no telling how long this will go on for. GoDaddy is credited with millions of websites under their care, all of which are unreachable. I have half of a dozen unreachable at the moment personally.

This isn't the first very public attack. They took down Facebook for a brief time in January of 2012 and the CIA website in February of 2012. They were recently credited for hacking into the laptop of the FBI that contained the UDID numbers for Apple mobile devices, although that remains non-vetted.

Tracking them is next to impossible. They are good enough to take down Facebook and GoDaddy, they are good enough to hide and let the public see only what they want. They are a worldwide collective of individuals with not aggregate component. Even their hierarchy is not well known. The closest you can get to a central point for information is AnonNews, which is a Wiki of sorts. Today's attacker is believed to be in Brazil.

Stay tuned to GoDaddy's Facebook page for updates and hope this does not go farther, as @AnonymousOwn3r claims he can take down 99% of the world's websites. That may sound like too lofty a goal, but it is not impossible. We can only hope he stops his attack or GoDaddy finds a way to fix it before long.

Update: most of our TMN sites are back up now! Keep up with TMN updates via our Twitter @MommiesNetwork and our Facebook Here