.Gh Domain Hack Renews Ghana Control Dispute Spotlight

In Short

• A .gh domain hack disrupted trust in Ghana’s country-code domain system.
• The incident landed during renewed debate over who should control the .gh registry.
• Google says Chrome users were protected after it blocked and revoked rogue certificates.

What Happened

The .gh domain hack has put Ghana’s internet infrastructure back under scrutiny. The attack targeted the .gh domain registry, which is the system that manages Ghana’s country-code top-level domain, similar to how a national address book maps website names to servers.

The incident came days after Ghanaian internet pioneer Nii Narku Quaynor spoke in a long video interview about Africa building and owning its technology. Quaynor’s company has operated the .gh registry for about three decades, and sources cited by Tech Labari say he has been in talks with the government about handing control to the state.

According to reporting on the broader incident, attackers hijacked infrastructure serving three country-code namespaces, .gh for Ghana, .sl for Sierra Leone, and .as for American Samoa. They changed authoritative DNS records, which are the master instructions that tell the internet where a domain should point.

The attackers also obtained HTTPS certificates for several Google domains and other organisations. An HTTPS certificate is the browser’s “ID card” that proves a site is genuine. If an attacker can control DNS, they can sometimes trick certificate issuers into выдаing certificates for domains they do not truly own, making impersonation easier.

Google said it blocked the rogue certificates in Chrome and worked with certificate authorities to revoke them. It also said its internal systems were not compromised.

Why It Matters

For startups, banks, and government services, country domains like .gh are a trust layer for websites and email. When DNS and certificates are compromised, users can be redirected to fake sites without noticing.

The hack also intensifies a long-running governance dispute. Ghana’s Electronic Transactions Act made the Ghana Domain Name Registry the legal manager of .gh, but operational control and ownership have remained contested. Because ICANN typically avoids transferring a country domain without the incumbent operator’s consent, any handover can become slow and political.

What happens next will shape not only domain security practices, but also how Ghana balances state oversight with private operation of critical internet infrastructure.