A sector called APNIC who manages the Whois of registered domains for the Asia-Pacific networks had documents published online available for download since June of 2017.
This incident was not noticed until October 12th. The passwords are hashed but they could be downloaded, anyone with the tools could see and exposed the hashed passwords.
It appears that the hacker who infiltrated the system could have set up his credentials as the admin or domain name maintainer and could have taken over the site and compromised it.
We will not know what their motive was but if sites from all over that part of the world are used from un-authorized administrators there will be huge problems in the near future if hackers decide to use the information they potentially could have stolen.