GoDaddy Admits to Role in Social Engineering Attack

GoDaddy has acknowledged that one of its employees fell victim to a social engineering attack allowing a hacker to take over a customer's domain names and eventually extort a coveted Twitter user name from him. PayPal, which the victim claimed also played a role in the attack, denied the accusations. Naoki Hiroshima, a software engineer and creator of the Cocoyon location sharing mobile app, reported Wednesday in a blog post that a hacker successfully extorted him into giving up his single-letter Twitter user name, called @N, after first hijacking his domain names registered at GoDaddy, email address and Facebook account.