Iranian Cyber Army strikes again... in China!

As reported by TheNextWeb in the wee small hours of the morning, the most popular search engine in China has just been hacked by the 'Iranian Cyber Army'. This is the same group that brought down Twitter and an advocacy site supporting the Iranian presidential protesters.

Comments on TheNextWeb suggest that the site (Baidu) wasn't down for long. It was also the same kind of attack on Twitter: DNS cache poisoning. The data servers themselves weren't exploited or backdoored -- instead, the DNS entries that point your computer to Baidu (or Twitter) were altered and pointed to the Iranian Cyber Army's splash screen.

As to why the Iranian Cyber Army attacked the Chinese search engine, who knows! They might not even be Iranian! It might merely be a group of hackers masquerading their actions behind the Twitter and 'green protesters' link. I doubt we'll ever know the answer, and having worked out how to easily poison DNS records, I doubt they'll stop any time soon.

Unless, of course, everyone started using Google's secure Public DNS...

Tags: baidu, dns, google, hack, iranian cyber army, IranianCyberArmy, public dns, PublicDns, twitter