GoDaddy Accused of Serious Security Failings by FTC

By James Coker for Infosecurity Magazine
Thursday, January 16, 2025

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Major security failures were the cause of multiple customer data breaches of web hosting giant GoDaddy, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has found.

Dr Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb and a Fellow at the British Computer Society (BCS), commented, “GoDaddy has been operating on extremely competitive and price-aggressive web hosting and domain names markets, unsurprisingly being unable to allocate sufficient resources to cybersecurity as stated in the FTC complaint.”

Commenting on the GoDaddy case, Kolochenko said the proposed order sends a strong message to web hosting companies about data security requirements.

While GoDaddy has not been slapped with a large financial settlement with the regulator, the cost of implimenting the security measures is likely to be high.

Additionally, non-compliance is likely to result in heavy penalties being issued.

“The history of previous FTC settlements clearly demonstrates the high risk of non-compliance with settlement orders. For instance, the record $5 billion penalty imposed on Facebook in 2019 was a for violation of the previous FTC settlement order with Facebook,” he said.

Kolochenko added: “The FTC is likely aware of this and will certainly keep an eye on GoDaddy: the story is unlikely to end here." Read Full Article