It's likely that the country's domain registrar has been hacked

Jun 20, 2013 12:52 GMT  ·  By

Although it hasn’t been confirmed, it appears that the top level domain registrar of Uganda has been hacked. 

According to The Hackers Media, pepsi-cola.ug, acer.ug, microsoft.org.ug, nokia.com.ug, paypal.com.ug, sony.org.ug, intel.co.ug, gmail.com.ug, yahoo.com.ug, msn.com.ug, google.or.ug and many others appear to have been defaced by a hacker that uses the online moniker “r00x.”

Of course, many of these domains are not even the legitimate domains of the respective companies. For instance, Google Uganda is hosted on google.co.ug, not google.or.ug.

However, that doesn’t matter. If the hacker breached the domain registrar’s systems, he can alter DNS records and make sure that the visitors of certain .ug domains are directed to his defacement page.

The list of impacted domains was published a couple of days ago. However, they still appeared to be defaced at the time of writing.

We've reached out to the .ug domain registry to find out if they can confirm the breach.

Update. The domain registry has responded to our inquiry. They deny being hacked, highlighting the fact that their website is “intact.”

We're hoping to get some more clarifications from them. In the meantime, we're trying to get in touch with the hackers to see if they can provide any details.

Update2. The Uganda registry has provided additional clarifications. Here is their complete statement:

“This appears to be an individual case where someone got unauthorized access to someone's registrar account and made changes to their name servers. We do not host these websites and so it is up-to the individual owners to put safe guards on their web servers.

We're however investigating this reported incident and we may suspend these domain names from the registry.

It is definitely not a situation which affected the core system but rather an isolated incident. We'll be notifying the legitimate owners of these domain names so that they rectify this situation.”