Twitter hackers drive Chinese search engine Baidu.com offline

 

On Monday Baidu.com was offline and at one point it displayed an image saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites.

 

There is no comprehensive information about the Iranian Cyber Army. First time they attracted the public attention was when they attacked Twitter on December 18.

 

According to security experts, Baidu's domain name records appear to have been tampered with. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses. "It looks like their domain account credentials may have been snagged," said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with the antivirus vendor Trend Micro.

 

That's the same technique that was used to hijack Twitter, when Iranian Cyber Army hackers were apparently able to log in to the account used to manage Twitter's DNS records and redirect visitors to another Web server that posted a message similar to the one spotted on Baidu.com. That attack knocked Twitter offline for more than an hour.