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Sorry Baidu users, your search engine is down for the count (in parts of the world, anyway), at least for the time being. No, a late night watchman didn't trip over the power cord in a data center, and instead the outage appears to be the work of Iranian hackers.
Baidu, China's most popular search engine with a market share exceeding 77 percent, now shows a page saying "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army." These are the same dudes who also attacked and defaced Twitter just a few weeks ago using the same method: DSN cache poisoning.
Sounds toxic, but rest assured, no chemicals were used. DNS cache poisoning involves corrupting a DNS table by replacing an IP with a malicious address, which in this case is the Iranian Cyber Army page.
Why the hackers targeted Baidu is not yet known.
Image Credit: thenextweb.com
Links:
[1] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/paul_lilly
[2] http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/01/12/breaking-baidu-hacked-iranian/
[3] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/hackers_target_third_party_apps_squirm_their_way_through_windows_security
[4] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/hackers_launch_wave_celebrity_death_scares_twitter
[5] http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/hackers_crack_code_allow_nonnvidia_gpus_run_physx
[6] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/baidu
[7] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/hacking
[8] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/internet
[9] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/online
[10] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/search_engine
[11] http://www.maximumpc.com/tags/security
[12] http://www.maximumpc.com/articles/news
[13] http://www.maximumpc.com/user/login?&commentfragment=comments_top_anchor