http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/iranian-cyber-army-strikes-chinese-site/?ref=asia January 12, 2010, 10:46 am 'Iranian Cyber Army' Strikes Chinese Site By ROBERT MACKEY
Less than a month after a group calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" attacked Twitter, users of China's most popular search engine, Baidu, were redirected on Tuesday morning to a Web page displaying a message claiming that the same group had blocked access to that site as well. China's official news agency, Xinhua, reported: Internet users attempting to open the site were greeted with a graphic stating that the site had been attacked by the Iranian Cyber Army. According to a report on the People's Daily website, hackers changed Baidu's DNS records, redirecting traffic to another site. As the BBC explained, "DNS records are like a telephone book, converting Web site names like baidu.com into a sequence of numbers understandable by the Internet." One Baidu insider told Chinanews.com.cn at 09:40 [01:40 GMT] that the problem has been solved, and that "it will be OK in half an hour." The site was still inaccessible until shortly before midday, though some users around the world reported problems several hours later. According to a report from the BBC, Baidu said in a statement that the attack was similar to the one that had made Twitter temporarily inaccessible last month: "This morning, Baidu's domain name registration in the United States was tampered with, leading to inaccessibility." As Reuters reported last month, there is no certainty that either of these attacks have come from Iranian groups at all. The graphic displayed on the page Baidu users were sent to showed an Iranian flag, which marked a difference from the page Twitter users saw in December, which had displayed a green flag and a different email address. The Chinese blogger who writes under the name Michael Anti posted a link on Twitter to what he called a "full record of Baidu.com being hacked" from the Chinese-language Twitter feed of a Web developer in Shanghai using the name tjmao. That account of the disruption, which ended earlier on Tuesday, included this image of the message users attempting to access Baidu were redirected to: Not long after the attack on Baidu, Michael Anti reported on Twitter that two attacks on Iranian Web sites had apparently been undertaken in retaliation by "poor-English-speaking hackers (or honkers)," who had decided to "hack back stupid Iranian comrades." According to Anti, the "sweet" attacks on Iranian Web sites were likely the work of "Chinese pro-gov hackers." As this post was published, users trying to load one of the Iranian sites attacked - Room98.ir/ - were being redirected to a page where, under a waving Chinese flag and a barrage of music, this message appeared: chinese honker team [H.U.C.] I'm very sorry for this Testing!.. ...Because of this morning your Iranian Cyber Army... ..Maybe you haven't konw this thing!,...... ...This morning your Iranian Cyber Army intrusion our baidu.com..... ...So i'm very unfortunate for you ... ..Please tell your so-called Iranian Cyber Army.. ...Don't intrusion chinese website about The United States authorities to intervene the internal affairs of Iran's response. a.. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company b.. Privacy Policy c.. NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
