Hackers temporarily paralyze Baidu, China’s top search engine

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Hackers paralyze China’s top search engine

BEIJING — China’s largest search engine, Baidu.com, said that it was temporarily shut down after a cyberattack Tuesday.

Hackers briefly blocked access to China’s top search engine by steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the “Iranian Cyber Army” claimed responsibility.

“Services on Baidu’s main website www.baidu.com were interrupted today due to external manipulation of its DNS (domain name server) in the U.S. Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored,” Baidu spokesman Victor Tseng said in a statement.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular news briefing Tuesday that China “opposes all cyber crimes, including hacking.”

There was no evidence the hackers are actually linked to Iran.

Baidu, pronounced “by-doo,” holds a market value of about $13 billion and dominates China’s Internet search like Google dominates the market in just about every other major country in the world. The research firm Analysys International pegs Baidu’s share at about 62 percent of China’s internet search market compared to 29 percent for Google.