Iranian Hackers Deface Baidu.com

Baidu.com, the most widely used search engine in China, came under seize of a hackers' group, which claimed itself as the Cyber Army of Iran.

On January 20, 2010, Baidu stated that after the attack during the 2nd week of January 2010, it took legal action against the US-based company which dealt with its American domain registration.

Because of the attack, Web surfers, who visited Baidu.com on January 11, 2010, saw a message that said - the Iranian Cyber Army had hacked the website. The message was also accompanied with a picture of Iran's flag.

In a blog posting, Graham Cluley (Senior Technology Consultant at the security company 'Sophos') stated that the assault could have potentially taken up an even worse form, as reported by Softpedia on January 12, 2010.

Commenting on the hacking attempt's danger, Cluley wrote that had the hackers infringed into the DNS records of the website, they could have diverted surfers intending to access www.baisu.com to the attackers' own Web server, as reported by Securitywatch.eweek on January 12, 2010.

Cluley added that although it seemed that the attack's motive was political rather than financial, the hackers could have easily created a copycat edition of Baidu's home page using a malware or software exploit.

Security researchers said that if there was malware on a third party website, then it could result in infection on numerous computers and their sensitive credentials stolen.

The hack activists of the Iranian Cyber Army had similarly defaced www.twitter.com in December 2009. At that time, the attackers reportedly gained illegal access to the admin board of the domain after hijacking its credentials. Subsequently, they changed the DNS settings.

Finally, the security researchers stated that irrespective of the purpose behind the recent hacking attack, this type of criminal activity could not be overlooked. Although this sort of attack just observed might currently appear inconsequential since it didn't really affect users with an immediate payload, it could potentially cause a more dangerous assault in the future cyber warfare.

Related article: Iranian Hackers Compromised Oregon University Web System

» SPAMfighter News - 1/27/2010