The so called “Iranian Cyber Army” took the main page of the search engine most used in China, Baidu. The raid happened on Tuesday, after having done the same with Twitter in December.

The press ran pictures of the home page of Baidu showing the message: “This site has been taken by the Iranian Cyber Army” on a black background with the flag of Iran. The group had already taken the popular micro-blogging site Twitter in December, replacing the main page of Twitter the same sentence and a shout anti-US.

While Twitter has had an important role in enabling communication over the Iranian student protests in June, still not clear why Baidu was attacked. China and Iran enjoy a relatively good relationship, based on sales of Chinese energy and gasoline to Iran.

“This morning, the domain registration Baidu in the United States was affected, leading to inaccessibility”, Baidu announced in an email sent to Reuters. The search engine was not working for at least four hours – the following site off the air at the time of publication of this note.

Baidu leads the search engines of Internet in China, even ahead of Google, with more than 60% of market share.

Via: NYT.