Domain register sued for hacking attack

A search engine in China is breaking new ground when it comes to internet legislation, by suing their domain host providers following a hacking attack.

The Chinese Search Engine, ‘Baidu’ is pursuing negligence claims after their site was subjected to malicious hacking activities. A Judge in the US has agreed that they have a valid case to pursue, against their domain register.

Register.com was hacked at the beginning of the year, and the activity was claimed to have originated from a group calling themselves the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’. The event occurred after hackers got in touch with Reigister.com posing as employees of Baidu, and were granted all the details required to access the entire account.

The hackers then went on to alter the server number which usually redirects Baidu users, in order to take control of the redirection process and pages the online users were taken to. They redirected all users to a site containing political messages. Baidu, as China’s most used and popular search engine facility, is thought to have lost millions of pounds of revenue following the hack.

A security expert from Sophos commented: “It’s like somebody going into the telephone book and changing your phone number. If you feel a company has caused you damage or cost you money one of the routes you can take is the legal route – but it does bring bad news back into headlines again which some companies would rather forget. Rather than displaying propaganda (the website) could have installed malware or spyware. Baidu in China is extremely popular – it could have infected a lot of computers.”

Following the event, Baidu chiefs have lodged a number of complaints against Register.com. The Judge agreeing to the litigation commented: “I hold that Baidu has alleged sufficient facts in its complaint to give rise to a plausible claim of gross negligence or recklessness.”

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