Report: Iranian Cyber Army Takes Down Baidu

The Iranian Cyber Army strikes again.

Reporting from China, the People's Daily Online said that the country's largest search engine--Baidu.com--was hacked late Monday night, and was down for the count for at least four hours. According to the report, the notorious Iranian Cyber Army--the group responsible for taking down Twitter last month--found a way to change Baidu's DNS records, thus redirecting traffic to an external site.

The attack on Twitter last month resulted in the same manner, replacing the front page with the same Iranian Cyber Army header and an anti-American message. It seemed obvious why the attack took place at the time: Twitter played host to Iranian student protects back in June 2009. However, it's unclear why the group has attacked the Chinese search engine this time around--China and Iran show similar interests, and remain allies.

There's speculation that the attack is in retaliation against Chinese Twitter users who use #CN4Iran hashtags to show support for reformists. There's also speculation that foreign hackers were attempting to discredit Iran by redirecting the Chinese search engine site to a supposed Iranian website. But despite speculation, the group has not come forward with its reasons for recent actions.

The Guardian reports that non-related hackers targeted Iranian websites as news of the Baidu.com hack spread across the Internet. Iranian website Room98 was infiltrated with a message from a Chinese group plastered on its front page. Iribu.ir found a message on its front page from a supposed Chinese group as well. But as reported last week after the Twitter attack, it's unlikely that Tehran was involved in either instances.