China’s top search engine Baidu was hacked on Tuesday in what state media said was an attack by a pro-Iranian government group that replaced the usual home page with an Iranian flag.
Internet users trying to access the site found a message saying “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army”, the People’s Daily reported on its website.
Below a sentence in Farsi read, “In reaction to the US authorities’ intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. This is a warning,” the report said, posting an image of the hacked page.
Baidu spokesman Victor Tseng said service was interrupted “due to external manipulation of its DNS (Domain Name Server) in the United States”.
“Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored,” the spokesman said in an email to AFP.
The state-run China News Service quoted an unnamed official at Baidu as saying the website’s domain name had been hijacked, redirecting traffic to another site, but it is unclear whether those responsible were in fact Iranian.
“The Iranian Cyber Army” was the name used by hackers who briefly shut down the popular microblogging site Twitter last month, using a method similar to that seen in the Baidu strike.
