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Baidu, China’s Largest Search Engine, Hacked by “Iranian Cyber Army”

By Joop on January 12th, 2010

Picture 42Baidu is suddenly unavailable, with sources all over China confirming this.

It seems that China’s most popular search engine, with a market share of over 77% has been hacked by Iranian hackers.

At present, the website is unavailable, but we have found a screenshot from Twitter user Budi Putra.

It seems that the website has had its DNS hacked by the “Iranian cyber Army”, the same guys that hacked Twitter a few weeks ago. The process, called DNS cache poisoning, is the corruption of an Internet server’s domain name system (DNS) table by replacing an Internet address with that of another, rogue address, in this case what the Iranian Cyber Army want you to see.

Exactly why The Iranian Cyber Army has decided to target Baidu.com is unknown but sources say it might be in relation to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, although no one is certain.

Can someone read Persian and translate this?

Update:

We’re being told the site is now accessible from some parts of the world. Still not so from Europe. Please let us know in the comments.

About the Author

Joop

Business development manager in Shanghai, always up to play with shiny gadgets, firecrackers or eat Shabu shabu. (Japanese hotpot)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  • Check out joop.in                                                                                                                               • Got Twitter? ♥ -> @Joop

Discussion - 106 Comments/Pingbacks RSS feed for comments on this post

« Older Comments
  1. U3h3 says January 13, 2010
    Reply

    IT IS FULL OF ERRORS NOW!
    (logos can’t be displayed, links direct me to the wrong places, only 2 or 3 functions out of the 62 functions are availabe, the images displayed by image searches are all red crosses, logging on screen is unavailable, etc……)

  2. U3h3 says January 13, 2010
    Reply

    If the hacker is standing in front of me I would definitely have killed him.

  3. Esteban "STEVE" Taracido says January 13, 2010
    Reply

    Google Vs. The Peoples Republic Of China/Baidu
    It look’s Like “Tit For Tat” ; my “Google” crashed and it now “Baidu” has crashed…..
    Google has 50 Million Un-Happy Customers In China alone and that only represents less than
    23% of the total market……Baidu has 77% of
    the balance and they have now crashed big-time!
    What Will Red China Do Next ? What Will The Obama/Biden Do Next ? We Are Truly Living In Interesting Times…..IBM left China altogether , years ago , when they got totally fed up with their “Knock-Off” industry , which
    duplicated , all of their manufactured personal computers , perhaps 5 to 1 .
    I think that Google , is absolutely right if it totally withdraws from Red China and all their anti-ethical business behaviour.

  4. Davidm says January 13, 2010
    Reply

    Chinese hackers are retaliating they have hacked into another Iranian website http://www.hrmbook.ir/

    • reza says January 14, 2010
      Reply

      this site is not in top 100,000 site in alexa!
      i don’t think we can compare baidu 8th popular site in world with this site.

  5. Solaris says January 20, 2010
    Reply

    they wrote the name of 3rd Imam (Hosain in shia islam- امام حسین)

  6. Sasan says January 31, 2010
    Reply

    Iran actually doesn't have such an army. The government of Iran pays skilled hackers of China or probably Russia to do the job for them. The reason of Hacking Baidu is just to mislead people to the fact that the hacker are not located in China but are in Iran.

    Assume that you are hacker, you receive an offer of $10,000 or more from an unknown person for hacking some websites. Won't you hack them? Remember that you are a hacker and hackers often hack!

  7. Ari says March 21, 2010
    Reply

    lol
    there is such army in IRAN.
    it is not just 1 Cyber army it is 3!!!
    they get about $20,000 from the Govt…
    the 3 of them are:
    Cyber Army
    Cyber Sepah
    Cyber Basig

    Don't comment about something that you don't know anything about!!!

  8. itouchzone.com says July 04, 2010
    Reply

    interesting, I don’t know if this is true. what is the purpose of doing that?

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