Baidu files lawsuit against US domain registrar blaming it for hacking

Chinese largest search engine Baidu.com filed a lawsuit against its US domain registrar over a hack that took down the Web site, alleging negligence by the US company.

Last week, users had failed accessing Baidu.com for several hours after the company's domain name server in the US was tampered with. The same group, the Iranian Cyber Army, that took down Twitter last month, also was found to be behind the attack on Baidu.

Baidu filed lawsuit in a court in New York, that seeks related damages and alleges "gross negligence" by Register.com led to the service disruption.

In the lawsuit Baidu said Baidu.com was hit by the outage, and that mirror site Baidu.com.cn had not been hurt. Domain service providers including Register.com provide the setup needed to take Internet users to the correct Web site when they type a domain name like Baidu.com.

Uncertainty in the Chinese search market persists after Google last week unveiled its intention withdraw from the country over censorship and cyberattacks. Meantime, Google's Chinese search engine still remains accessible in the country, but authorities have said Google must follow local laws when asked about the US company's plans to stop censoring search results.