Chinese search engine hacked

The Iranian Cyber Army strike!

China's most popular search engine, Baidu, has been hacked by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army, the same group that took Twitter offline in December.

The site was down for at least four hours on Tuesday, which redirected Baidu users to a site that displayed a political message from the Iranian Cyber Army. Like the attack on Twitter last month, the site displayed the message, "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" and was accompanied by a picture of the national flag of Iran.

The cyber-group has taken full responsibility releasing a statement saying, "This morning, Baidu's domain name registration in the United States was tampered with, leading to inaccessibility."

Online war

The attack has led to an 'online battle' as Chinese hackers retaliate against Iranian sites, despite the strong political ties between Tehran and Beijing. Some Chinese online blogs have speculated that it could be response to Chinese Twitter users who have used a #CN4Iran hashtag to express their support for Iranian reformists.

"It's the same warning showed to twitter.com ... but I'm not very sure how you would connect this to #CN4Iran. Baidu is a very weird choice," said Michael Anti, an influential Chinese blogger to The Guardian.

Already several Iranian sites have been targeted by Chinese hackers with the room98.ir website hacked by the "Chinese Honker Team". Underneath a large Chinese flag, the group left the message, "This morning your Iranian Cyber Army intrusion [sic] our baidu.com ... Please tell your so-called Iranian Cyber Army ... Don't intrusion Chinese website about the United States authorities to intervene the internal affairs of Iran's response ... This is a warning!"

Baidu is a popular search engine in China and is more often used than Google, commanding over 60 percent of the search market in China. In a statement, the company said, "Services on Baidu's main website www.baidu.com were interrupted today due to external manipulation of its DNS (Domain Name Server) in the US. Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored."

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