Chinese Search Engine Baidu Defaced By Hacker Group
The Iranian Cyber Army hackers changed Baidu's DNS records, redirecting traffic to another site, reported the People's Daily Online, the Web site of the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper.
"This morning, Baidu's domain name registration in the United States was tampered with, leading to inaccessibility," Baidu said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Reuters said that experts didn't believe that the attacks were initiated by the Iranian government. It is also possible that the Baidu attack originated somewhere other than Iran.
During the attack, Baidu users were redirected to another site hosted by the hackers. Screenshots of the attack showed messages on the site reading "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" along with images of the Iranian flag. China's search engine was shut down for about four hours before being restored Tuesday.
The Baidu attack occurs after the same Iranian hacker organization launched a similar attack on micro-blogging site Twitter in December. The hackers hijacked the Twitter homepage to redirect users to a site hosting the same message and anti-American slogans.
Last June, Iranian citizens used Twitter to organize and garner political support following outrage over what they claimed were fraudulent election practices.
The San-Francisco-based Twitter was used as one of the main vehicles of communication to propel the revolution and was forced to reschedule a planned maintenance in order to keep the channel of communication open for tweeters sending information to and from Iran.