This morning over dumplings, we decided to do a quick search about the ShangHai 2010 EXPO. We visited BaiDu, China’s most popular search engine. But, much to our surprise, we were delivered a “Server Not Found” page.

Expats in China get used to these "failures to connect" when we are attempting to access “harmful” sites, such as FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Google, for a few hours back in 2008. But, we found it hard to believe that the government would shut down the Chinese People's favorite search engine (talk about the makings of a revolt).

So, we did a little investigation. We visited some of the BaiDu sub-domains and were continually redirected to Yahoo’s error page. That’s when we suspected foul play.

A little visit to WHOIS.sc showed the DNS had been changed and its primary domain had been resolved to an IP in Holland! After further research, we found that Baidu had been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army! Apparently, they used the same method to hack BaiDu as was used on Twitter not long ago.

What's the Iranian Cyber Army's bef with BaiDu?  Seems they got their feathers ruffled over the 5 Chinese net citizen that supported Twitter's role in the Iranian rebellion of 2008--well, maybe more like 8 Net Citizens. 

Seriously, the Chinese government suppressed much of the news about the Iranian rebellion (big surprise). So, it didn’t get much airplay on this side of the Great Fire Wall. So, we're a little surprised by the Iranian's Cyber Army's reason for attack.  We suspect they saw BaiDu as easy prey. And decided to take BaiDu down for some much desired time in the spot light.

Currently, the DNS is the weakest link of a website and is often attacked by hackers. In order to protect the DNS from attack, the DNS service provider should provide a function that locks the numerical value of the name server within a certain period of time and prohibit the value to be changed.

Of course, it goes without saying.  This is the type of thing we never alow to happen to our partners and clients Online Marketing in China