Over the past few days, official regional domains belonging to Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, Bing, and IBM were quietly hijacked. Yet neither Google nor Microsoft was actually breached. Instead, attackers struck much higher up the internet food chain—compromising the master systems that control entire country-level domains.

Based on today’s investigative breakdown by tech analyst ThioJoe, Pariganaka.com examines how attackers took over three top-level domain (TLD) registries, minted over 100 legitimate SSL certificates, and exposed a terrifying single point of failure in global internet infrastructure.

What Happened Between September 22 and September 27?

Between September 22 and September 27, threat actors compromised the organizations managing three separate Country-Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs):

• .gh (Ghana)
• .sl (Sierra Leone)
• .as (American Samoa)

Using top-level administrative access, the attackers targeted high-profile domains registered under those country extensions—such as google.sl, youtube.sl, and various subdomains.

Rather than forging fake credentials, the hackers acquired over 100 genuine, browser-trusted SSL certificates impersonating roughly 50 major organizations. In at least one verified instance captured on the Internet Archive, attackers actively hijacked the DNS zone of a regional Google domain and redirected visitors to a defaced page. (Note: Users visiting the main google.com domain were not affected).

Registry vs. Registrar: Understanding the Attack Vector

To understand how attackers bypassed Google’s world-class security without touching Google’s servers, it helps to distinguish between two core pillars of the Domain Name System (DNS):

1. The Registrar: The retail company where businesses and individuals purchase domain names (e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap).
2. The Registry: The master organization at the very top of the hierarchy that controls an entire top-level domain extension (for instance, Verisign manages .com and .net, while Public Interest Registry manages .org). Crucially, the Registry maintains the master list of Name Servers that tell browsers where to find a domain’s DNS records.

Step-by-Step: How the Hackers Pulled It Off

When a website requests an SSL certificate—which encrypts traffic and proves to your browser that the site is authentic—the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) requires proof of domain ownership, typically by checking for a specific code in the domain’s DNS records.

Here is how the attackers weaponized that automated trust process:

• Step 1 — Breaching the TLD Registries: The hackers compromised the backend registry systems for .gh, .sl, and .as.
• Step 2 — Hijacking Name Servers: With registry-level control, they altered the Name Server records for official domains owned by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies, pointing them to Name Servers controlled by the attackers.
• Step 3 — Manipulating DNS Zones: Controlling the Name Servers gave the hackers full control over the domains’ DNS records, allowing them to dictate which IP addresses visitors were sent to.
• Step 4 — Minting Legitimate SSL Certificates: Finally, the attackers requested SSL certificates from standard Certificate Authorities. Because they controlled the DNS records, they easily passed automated domain-validation checks and received real, cryptographically valid SSL certificates.

With both DNS redirection and valid SSL certificates in hand, any user visiting those regional domains would be routed to an attacker-controlled server while their browser displayed a valid security padlock.

Google’s Response and the Unrevoked Certificate Gap

Detection was not instantaneous. For the affected Google domains, the fastest time between a fraudulent certificate being issued and subsequently blocked was roughly 36 hours (a day and a half), while the slowest went undetected for nearly a week.

• Chrome’s Certificate Blocklist: Google responded by pushing an emergency update to Google Chrome’s built-in certificate blocklist, neutralizing over 100 compromised certificates across all 50 affected organizations.
• The Revocation Problem: Strikingly, while Chrome now blocks these certificates, many of them have not yet been formally revoked by the issuing Certificate Authorities—possibly due to bureaucratic delays waiting for individual domain owners to file revocation requests. This means applications or browsers outside of Chrome’s blocklist ecosystem could still treat those hijacked certificates as valid.

The Bigger Picture: How Fragile is the Internet’s Trust Chain?

While some have speculated whether AI played a role in the breach, there is no evidence that an autonomous AI executed the hack, though threat actors frequently use AI tools to research infrastructure weaknesses.

More importantly, this incident serves as a wake-up call regarding the fragility of centralized trust chains. While smaller country-code registries may lack the cybersecurity funding of major tech giants, the architectural flaw remains the same: if a top-level registry like Verisign (.com) were ever compromised in a similar manner, attackers could theoretically hijack and impersonate nearly any commercial website on Earth overnight.