Lenovo’s Domain Record Appears Jacked

Early reports came in from Verge that Lenovo was hacked, however upon visiting the website, many reported no problems. Lenovo servers were not, in fact hacked, however it appears that the lenovo.com domain record may have been hijacked. Two whois queries below show that the domain was updated today and its name servers were changed over from Lenovo’s own to CloudFlare.

Given recent DDoS attempts against Lenovo lately, it’s not entirely impossible that Lenovo decided to host with CloudFlare, however given their own massive infrastructure, I’d call this extremely unlikely; in that event, the transition went quite miserable from Verge’s point of view. What most likely is happening is the hacked site being hosted behind CloudFlare, and the name records simply have been hijacked.

Lenovo uses an obscure Chinese registrar (webnic.cc), so it’s foreseeable that the registrar could have been socially engineered to gain control of the domain. How ironic would it be, though, if the credentials to Lenovo’s account were stolen by decrypting Lenovo traffic using Superfish certs? Perhaps poetic justice?

It looks as though the domain may have even been deleted from, or transferred out of webnic. If this is the case (and not just a malfunction), then it could take even longer for Lenovo to get the domain back.

Naturally, as DNS takes time to propagate, more and more people will see the hacked version (sitting on some other server not at Lenovo), and when Lenovo finally regains control, it will take up to 24 hours or so for users to start seeing the DNS switch back.

This smells more of an amateur stunt rather than a good old fashioned hacking. No zero-days were harmed in the making of this defacement. In fact, Lenovo’s servers seem to be completely intact. Just another day at the zoo.