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
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