Google, Lenovo hit by DNS attack

The redirection of Lenovo's website as also Google's main search page for Vietnam this week highlighted weaknesses with the internet's addressing system, PC World reported.

Visitors to lenovo.com were yesterday greeted with what appeared to be webcam images of a bored young man sitting in a bedroom, and the song ''Breaking Free'' from an old Disney movie. Visitors to the internet search company's site for Vietnam too were briefly redirected to another website.

Both Google and Lenovo suffered ''domain hijacking,'' a type of attack against Domain Name System (DNS), which translated domain names into IP addresses that could be called into a browser.

The domain name records for both companies were modified to redirect people to different websites on entry of ''lenovo.com'' and ''google.com.vn'' in the browser.

The changes were apparently made through Web Commerce Communications, known as Webnic.cc, a Malaysian company that registered domains names.

The credit for the attack was claimed by hacker group Lizard Squad. Lenovo at one time seemed to be able to restore service, but was later unavailable due to system maintenance, according to a notice.

In a statement issued in the US last night, Lenovo, the world's biggest maker of personal computers, said it had restored its site to normal operations after several hours, Reuters reported.

"We regret any inconvenience that our users may have if they are not able to access parts of our site at this time," the company said. "We are actively reviewing our network security and will take appropriate steps to bolster our site and to protect the integrity of our users' information."

Although consumer data is unlikely to have been compromised by the Lizard Squad attack, the breach came as the second incident of the type  for Lenovo in a matter of days.

The US Department of Homeland Security said in an alert last Friday that the Superfish program, which came pre-installed on nearly a dozen Lenovo laptop models, rendered users vulnerable to a type of cyberattack known as "SSL spoofing" (See: US government advises Lenovo to remove ''Superfish'' from laptops).

The attack could allow hackers to read encrypted web traffic, redirect traffic from official websites to spoofs, and launch other attacks.