This morning, GoDaddy disclosed that an unknown attacker had gained unauthorized access to the system used to provision the company’s Managed WordPress sites, impacting up to 1.2 million of their WordPress customers. Note that this number does not include the number of customers of those websites that are affected by this breach, and some GoDaddy customers have multiple Managed WordPress sites in their accounts.
According to the report filed by GoDaddy with the SEC [1], the attacker initially gained access via a compromised password on September 6, 2021, and was discovered on November 17, 2021 at which point their access was revoked. While the company took immediate action to mitigate the damage, the attacker had more than two months to establish persistence, so anyone currently using GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress product should assume compromise until they can confirm that is not the case.
It appears that GoDaddy was storing sFTP credentials either as plaintext, or in a format that could be reversed into plaintext. They did this rather than using a salted hash, or a public key, both of which are considered industry best practices for sFTP. This allowed an attacker direct access to password credentials without the need to crack them.
According to their SEC filing: “For active customers, sFTP and database usernames and passwords were exposed.”
We attempted to contact GoDaddy for comment and to confirm our findings, but they did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.
What did the attacker have access to?
The SEC filing indicates that the attacker had access to user email addresses and customer numbers, the original WordPress Admin password that was set at the time of provisioning, and SSL private keys. All of these could be of use to an attacker, but one item, in particular, stands out:
During the period from September 6, 2021, to November 17, 2021, the sFTP and database usernames and passwords of active customers were accessible to the attacker.
GoDaddy stored sFTP passwords in such a way that the plaintext versions of the passwords could be retrieved, rather than storing salted hashes of these passwords, or providing public key authentication, which are both industry best practices.
This article originally appeared on the Wordfence Blog. Read the rest here: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2021/11/godaddy-breach-plaintext-passwords/