Posted on 01/20/2010 4:53:35 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Chinese search engine Baidu sues US company over hacking attack
China's largest search engine, Baidu.com, is seeking damages against its US-based service provider after hackers from the "Iranian Cyber Army" hijacked the company's homepage in China last week.
By Peter Foster in Beijing
Published: 7:00AM GMT 20 Jan 2010
The move in a New York law court comes a week after Google threatened to pull out of China if the Chinese government did not allow it to operate its local site free of the country's onerous censorship laws.
Baidu.com, which accounts for two-thirds of China's internet searches, said it had filed the claim against Register.com, accusing the US company of "gross negligence" in failing to prevent the attacks which lasted for four hours on January 12.
Twitter, the popular microblogging site which is banned in China, was subjected to a similar attack a few weeks earlier.
Following the attack on Baidu, Chinese media carried embarrassing snapshots of the company's home page showing a message "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" against a dark background and the Iranian flag.
The regime in Tehran, which is currently under pressure from pro-democracy forces using social networking sites like Twitter, is a key Middle Eastern ally and oil supplier to China.
"Today Baidu filed a lawsuit against its domain name registration service provider Register.com, Inc. in a US court in New York, seeking damages over the incident of Baidu's service interruption last week," the Chinese firm said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
This circus is getting interesitng.
Related ping
It is hard to get my mind around the power of government when speaking of absolutely unlimited funds, resources and military manpower called the Police.
I just saw a German flick called “Lives of Others” about the Stasi spying on East Germans in the 1980s. It was scary, but tech.ly quaint, with state spies steaming open letters and listening to bugs in apartments.
If they had the tools of repression and control available today, maybe they would not have been overthrown.
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