Hundreds of domains were hijacked earlier this month and redirected to an exploit kit landing page as part of an attack targeting the French domain name registrar and hosting services provider Gandi.
According to an incident report published by Gandi last week, the hacker attack involved one of its technical partners, which helps the company connect to some of the 200 registries that allow it to manage more than 2.1 million domain names across 730 top level domains (TLDs).
The attacker managed to obtain credentials to a web portal of this technical partner. It’s unclear how the credentials were stolen, but Gandi suspects that the data may have been intercepted from the HTTP connection to its partner’s portal. The company highlighted that its own systems or the infrastructure of its technical partner have not been breached.
Once they gained access to the web portal, the attacker modified the name servers for 751 domains in an effort to redirect their visitors to an exploit kit.
According to SWITCH, the registry for .ch (Switzerland) and .li (Liechtenstein) domain names, which had 94 of its domains hijacked, victims were redirected to the RIG exploit kit. One of the affected domains belongs to Swiss security firm SCRT, which also had its incoming emails redirected to a foreign mail server.
Gandi said it learned about the incident on July 7 from a registrar and immediately started reverting the changes made by the attacker. The company has also reset all login credentials to the platforms used to connect to registries and technical partners.
In the case of SCRT, the visitors of its website were only redirected to the exploit kit for roughly one hour, but Gandi said the unauthorized changes were in place for up to 11 hours, until all the updates made by the attackers were reversed.
Gandi determined that 18 SSL certificates were issued for the affected domains during the attacks, but its analysis showed that each of the certificates is legitimate.
This was not the only recent incident involving domain names. Earlier this month, a security researcher noticed that he could register several domain names that matched the authoritative name servers for the .io TLD.
While the researcher suggested that registering the domains could have allowed him to hijack most of the DNS traffic for the .io TLD, others pointed out that the outcome couldn’t have been as catastrophic as the researcher claimed.
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