14 DAY TRIAL // An unredacted copy of the complaint filed by Chinese Internet search engine Baidu against Register.com in a New York court last month has surfaced on the Internet. The document reveals that a group of Iranian hacktivists hijacked Baidu's domain name by unconvincingly impersonating a company representative.
On January 12, baidu.com was hijacked and pointed to a Web page displaying the Iranian flag and a message reading "THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY." The attack lasted for about five hours, the time it took Baidu to regain control of the domain name, but full service took two days to restore.
According to the complaint (PDF), published by Domain Name Wire, a member of the "Iranian Cyber Army" contacted Register.com tech support via an online chat system and posing as a Baidu employee. The imposter proceeded to request the change of the contact e-mail address for the baidu.com domain. The Chinese company claims the attacker failed to provide correct identification information, but the Register.com staffer initiated the procedure either way.
As part of the process, a verification code is sent to the e-mail address on record, which has to be communicated back to the support staffer. The imposter responded with a bogus code, but the Register.com employee failed to check if it was valid and changed the @baidu.com e-mail address, with a very suspicious [email protected] one.
"Incredibly, Defendant thus changed e-mail address on file from one that was clearly a business address and contained the name of the account owner, to an e-mail address that conveyed a highly politically charged message ('antiwahabi'), with the domain name ('gmail.com') of a competitor of Baidu, at the request of an individual who not only could not produce the correct security verification, but actually produced false information twice during the verification process," Baidu's complaint reads.
But the alleged negligence and incompetence don't stop here. After the domain name of the largest Internet search engine in China, servicing hundreds of millions of users, was hijacked, the Register.com tech support staffers refused to help the real company representatives fix the problem via online chat. They also failed to respond to phone calls, despite the fact that Register.com claims 24/7 support availability.
"Full service was not restored to Baidu and its users for two days. As a direct and proximate result, Baidu suffered damages mounting into the millions of dollars, including lost revenue from its search engine service, out-of-pocket expenses addressing the catastrophe and responding to public and customer inquiries, and damage to Baidu's commercial reputation and the value of its business," the Beijing-based company claims.