Twitter hackers bring down Chinese search engine Baidu
12 Jan 2010
Baidu.com, China's top internet search engine's home page was down yesterday morning after coming under a cyber attack by a group that took down the free social networking and microblogging site Twitter last month.
Baidu, the No. 1 search engine in China, controlling 61.6 per cent of China's search engine market share as of June 2009, was offline yesterday morning with Internet users finding its usual home page replaced with a message saying ''This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.''
Baidu's website had the image of an Iranian flag and a shattered Star of David. The website also had a sentence written in Farsi language that read, ''In reaction to the US authorities intervention in Iran's internal affairs. This is a warning.''
Although Baidu was able to restore the site after two and half hours, it is rare for the Chinese search giant to be down for so long since the company prides itself of having one of the best security protection systems.
According to security experts, the hackers deployed the same technique to bring down Baidu, that waqs used to hack Twitter on 18 December. Baidu's domain name account credentials appear to have been tampered with since Baidu was shown to be using domain name servers belonging to a Florida-based ISP, HostGator, instead of the Baidu.com name servers used by the company.
Twitter, which was down for more than an hour last month after it had it's domain name account was hijacked in a similar way by Iranian Cyber Army hackers, who logged in to the account used to manage Twitter's DNS records and redirected visitors to another web server that had posted a similar message like the one seen on Baidu.com yesterday.
