Baidu sues US domain registrar for negligence
20 Jan 2010
Top Chinese search engine Baidu.com has sued its US domain registrar for negligence over a hack attack on its web site that brought it down, Baidu site said on Wednesday.
Users had difficulty accessing Baidu.com for several hours last week following tampering of the company's domain name server in US. The Iranian Cyber Army, the group what brought down Twitter last month seems to have coordinated the attack on Baidu.
The lawsuit filed in a New York court, seeks related damages and alleges the service disruption was caused by 'gross negligence' on the part of Register.com. In a statement, Baidu said Baidu.com was hit by the outage and the mirror site Baidu.com.cn had not been affected.
Domain service providers including Register.com provide the setup that allows internet users to connect to the correct web site when they type a domain name like Baidu.com in their browser window.
Baidu's move comes only two days after Baidu said Yinan Li chief technology officer had left the company. Li was the top executive to leave the company in a month following chief operating officer Peng Ye's resignation. According to Baidu both resigned for personal reasons.
Baidu's business had taken a hit in recent times over difficulties migrating advertisers to a new bid system.
The events add to the uncertainty in the Chinese search market even as Google has threatened to withdraw from the country over censorship issues and recent cyberattacks.
Google's Chinese search engine remains accessible n the country, but authorities insist that Google follow local laws in response to the US company's plans to stop censoring search results.
