By Sam Boughedda
Investing.com — GoDaddy Inc (NYSE:GDDY) shares are down 4.6% Monday after it reported a data breach warning that up to 1.2 million accounts had their email address and customer number exposed.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed the web-hosting company discovered unauthorized third-party access to its Managed WordPress hosting environment last Wednesday, November 17. WordPress is a content management system used for setting up blogs and websites.
"We identified suspicious activity in our Managed WordPress hosting environment and immediately began an investigation with the help of an IT forensics firm and contacted law enforcement. Using a compromised password, an unauthorized third party accessed the provisioning system in our legacy code base for Managed WordPress," GoDaddy stated.
GoDaddy added that its investigation is ongoing, but it discovered on September 6, the "unauthorized third party used the vulnerability to gain access to information including customer email addresses and phone numbers, original WordPress admin passwords, active customers' FTP and database usernames and passwords, and some active customers' SSL private key.
The company added that it is "sincerely sorry for this incident and the concern it causes for our customers."