{"id":913,"date":"2010-08-08T18:31:36","date_gmt":"2010-08-08T22:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/?p=913"},"modified":"2010-08-08T18:48:35","modified_gmt":"2010-08-08T22:48:35","slug":"how-i-saved-godaddy-in-2001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/how-i-saved-godaddy-in-2001\/","title":{"rendered":"How I saved GoDaddy in 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/GoDaddy.com\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>GoDaddy<\/strong><\/a> is the biggest domain registrar today, with 40 million domain names under their control.<\/p>\n<p>Bob Parsons started small but by 2001 they were already growing by leaps and bounds, having thousands of customers.<\/p>\n<p>Having registered my first domains with GoDaddy in December of 2000, it didn&#8217;t take me long to realize that there was something fishy with the user account and password system.<\/p>\n<p>Back then I didn&#8217;t have a need to keep all of my domains under the same GoDaddy account, so every so often I&#8217;d create a new account which would correspond to a new, incremented customer number. If the browser cookies were deleted, the registration process would provide that new account with a matching numerical password.<\/p>\n<p>So if you were <strong>user 123456<\/strong> the password for that domain registration would also be <strong>123456<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>It got even scarier: having deleted all cookies, you could enter one such account number during the registration process and all you had to do was enter the matching number as the password; the contact and billing info of the account holder would be automatically populated.<\/p>\n<p>Back then there was no direct support, one had to post their issue at SupportWebsite.com &#8211; so I had to catch GoDaddy&#8217;s attention, which I did by making a post with the title &#8220;<em>SEVERE security issue discovered!<\/em>&#8221; &#8211; GoDaddy emailed me asking for the details.<\/p>\n<p>Barb Rechterman, VP of Development for GoDaddy Software contacted me, thanking me for letting them know of the details. Within days, the security hole was patched and the password allocation system was changed.\u00a0 Nowadays, Barb is the Senior Executive Vice President &amp; Chief Marketing Officer for GoDaddy and I&#8217;m glad she did not ignore my emails back then.<\/p>\n<p>When creating an account system, it&#8217;s not smart to generate <strong>sequential account numbers<\/strong>; but defaulting the password to the same number is <strong>simply dumb<\/strong>. The majority of account holders don&#8217;t view this as a risk but rather, as a &#8220;convenience&#8221; and would not bother to change the password, as it was the case with GoDaddy in January of 2001.<\/p>\n<p>Just another story from the vault that might or might not be of interest today &#8211; you be the judge. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar today, with 40 million domain names under their control. Bob Parsons started small but by 2001 they were already growing by leaps and bounds, having thousands of customers. Having registered my first domains with GoDaddy in December of 2000, it didn&#8217;t take me long to realize that there was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,3],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-domains","tag-godaddy","entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How I saved GoDaddy in 2001 - Acro.net - A Domain Investing Blog by Theo Develegas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/how-i-saved-godaddy-in-2001\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How I saved GoDaddy in 2001 - Acro.net - A Domain Investing Blog by Theo Develegas\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar today, with 40 million domain names under their control. 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