Friday, January 15, 2010

Iranian Cyber Army Strikes Again

At the end of my post in December titled "Iranian Cyber Army Hacks Twitter", I asked "what's next for the Iranian Cyber Army". I appears that although trumped for media coverage this week with the Chinese attack on Google and Others, the Iranian Cyber Army has struck again, this time they have successfully defaced Baidu, a search engine based in China. Interestingly enough Baidu is the only competitor to Google in China, and stands to benefit should Google decide to close operations in China. For more information on the recent Google attack you can read my blog post on the topic (Cyber Attack on Google and Others).

It appears that Baidu was compromised similarly to Twitter on Tuesday, January 12th in that their DNS records were changed to point to a server hosted by the ISP ThePlanet.com in Houston, TX which displayed an Iranian Flag and message stating that the site was hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army to any user whom tried to use the Baidu website www.baidu.com. Baidu corrected the issue approximately 2 hours later according to sources on the internet.

As with Twitter, this appears to only have been a successful defacing attack, however the attacker could have just as easily created a fake baidu page, and pharmed or phished information from users.

It is startling the frequency at which these attacks are happening as of late and shows the dire need we have for a global cyber-coalition.

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