(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — An attack by hackers last week, China’s most widely used search engine, Baidu (www.baidu.com), announced plans to sue Register.com (www.register.com), the New York-based company hosting its main websites.
Following a January 12 attack that left Baidu’s main search engine inaccessible for several hours, Baidu announced on Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit against register.com and that it was actively seeking a new hosting provider for its search engine. “The fault of register.com led to the malicious and unlawful altering of the domain name of Baidu, which made thousands of people unable to visit baidu.com and brought serious losses to Baidu,” the company stated, according to a report posted to earthtimes.org.
Last week, Baidu searches were reportedly redirected, and its homepage carried the message, “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.” This suggests that it was the same group that hacked social networking site, Twitter, last month.
China’s search engine market was in the international spotlight last week when Google said it may pull out of China because of the increasingly threatening online environment in China following online attacks that, evidence suggests, uncovered the covert actions of third-parties spying on the contents of the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.
While it holds a healthy lead in the North American search market, Google is a secondary search engine in China, with roughly 30 percent of the market share, compared to Baidu’s more than 60 percent. Reuters notes that Google’s leaving China would hand over market share to Baidu, and even if Google remains in China, Baidu stands to gain because of businesses’ failing confidence in Google.
Earlier this week, Baidu’s chief technology officer, Li Yinan, had resigned for “personal reasons.” It remains unknown if the resignation had any connection with the hacking attack.
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