Web hosting giant GoDaddy has revealed that it has fallen victim to yet another cybersecurity incident, this time linked to a larger and more sophisticated campaign.

The company stated that a small number of its customers had reported issues with their websites being intermittently redirected in early December 2022. An analysis showed that the redirects were occurring on various sites hosted on GoDaddy’s cPanel shared hosting services. After further analysis, it was revealed that the cause was hackers who had breached the company’s cPanel shared hosting environment and installed malware that caused customer websites to intermittently redirect their visitors.

The sophisticated threat actor responsible for this attack appears to have a specific agenda - infecting websites and servers with malware for phishing campaigns, malware distribution, and other malicious activities. In a statement, GoDaddy said, "We have evidence, and law enforcement has confirmed, that this incident was carried out by a sophisticated and organized group targeting hosting services like GoDaddy."

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company revealed that it believes this latest attack and others are part of a multi-year campaign conducted by a sophisticated threat actor. According to the filing, the hackers obtained source code associated with some of GoDaddy's services.

Previous disclosures by the company suggest that this latest incident is part of a larger campaign. In May 2020, GoDaddy discovered that the hosting login credentials of 28,000 customers had been compromised. And in November 2021, a compromised password was used to access a provisioning system linked to Managed WordPress services, impacting 1.2 million customers across several GoDaddy brands.

Despite the recent cybersecurity incidents, GoDaddy has reported that they have not resulted in any material adverse impact to their business or operations. However, as threats are constantly evolving, the company recognizes the difficulty of detecting and successfully defending against them.