securityweek.comarticle

Google Domains Impacted by Recent ccTLD Hijacks

Google disclosed that attackers hijacked the authoritative DNS of three ccTLDs (.gh for Ghana, .sl for Sierra Leone, .as for American Samoa) and used control of those domains to obtain unauthorized HTTPS certificates covering several Google domains and domains of other organizations. Google blocked the fraudulent certificates in Chrome, worked with issuing CAs to revoke them, and used Certificate Transparency log analysis to find other affected brands, some of which it proactively notified. Google is urging domain owners to monitor CT logs and publish restrictive CAA records after regaining DNS control, since CAs may cache and reuse prior domain-control-validation checks, letting attackers mint new certs even after the hijack ends.