Baidu hacked by Iranian Cyber Army

Baidu, China's search engine became unavailable on Tuesday. However, it wasn't the overzealous blocking by censors that prevented Internet users opening the site. Opening the page revealed a graphic stating that the site had been attacked by the Iranian Cyber Army. According to a report on the People's Daily website, hackers changed Baidu's DNS records, redirecting traffic to another site. One Baidu insider told Chinanews.com.cn at 09:40 [01:40 GMT] that the problem has been solved, and that "it will be OK in half an hour." The site was still inaccessible at 11:00 [03:00 GMT], but was available shortly before midday.

The news travelled swiftly around Twitter and amused some users. One Chinese Twitter user known as @mranti said, "I'm happy watching stupid pro-gov Iranian Cyber Army fucking pro-gov Baidu.com. Yeah, pls do more!" Others also published screengrabs and information connected to the outage [link].

It is not the first time the Iranian Cyber Army has attacked websites. In December last year the social networking site Twitter was brought down by a similar attack [BBC / CNN]. The hacking group is believed to side with the Iranian government, though little is known about them.

tvnewswatch, Beijing, China