Google Malaysia website affected by DNS redirect attack
KUALA LUMPUR: When typing www.google.com … Abhimanyu Ghoshal / The Next Web : Hijackers target Google's Malaysian home page and disrupt service Francois Lenoir / Reuters : Google Malaysia service disrupted by hackers Bryan Cinco / Manila Channel : Google Malaysia Hacked by #Bangladeshi Hacker Vijay / TechWorm : Google Malaysia hacked by Bangladeshi hackers Andrew Griffin / The Independent : Google Malaysia hacked: cyber-attack re-directs page to hacker website G. Surach / The Rakyat Post : Google Malaysia hacked, search engine assures passwords are safe BorneoPost Online : ‘Google Malaysia hacked’ Jagran Post : Google Malaysia hacked by ‘Tiger-Mate Bangladeshi Hacker’
Context & Ripple Effects
The Google Malaysia redirect lands in a concentrated run of attacks on Malaysian web properties in early 2015: weeks earlier, the Malaysia Airlines site was defaced by Lizard Squad, and just days before this story, Lenovo.com was hijacked in what looked like the same campaign.
The mechanism matters more than the defacement: Krebs on Security traced the Lenovo and Google domain hijacks to a compromise at the Webnic registrar, meaning attackers did not breach Google's servers — they manipulated where the domain pointed. That makes this an attack on the DNS layer rather than on any single company's infrastructure.
First-order effects
- Users typing Google's address in Malaysia were sent to a hacker-controlled page instead of the search engine, disrupting service until the records were corrected — while Google moved quickly to reassure visitors that stored passwords and account credentials were untouched.
Second-order effects
- With Webnic named as the common point of failure across the Lenovo and Google hijacks, every other company whose domains sit with that registrar faces the same redirect risk, pushing registrars themselves into the threat model alongside the sites they serve.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, domain registrars get treated as critical infrastructure — with hardened account controls, transfer locks, and audit requirements becoming table stakes — because hijacking DNS at the source lets one small compromise redirect even the largest brands' traffic.
The trend: Attackers are increasingly bypassing well-defended corporate servers to hijack traffic upstream at registrars and DNS providers, turning domain management into a frontline security surface.