Comments on: Baidu: Page not Found

By: Resignation of Baidu's CTO | CHINAYOUREN

Resignation of Baidu's CTO | CHINAYOUREN — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:18:52 +0000

[...] it would normally, as people will be quick to find connections with the Google China affair and the hacker attack on Baidu. Both are unlikely to have any relation with Li’s decision. The crisis in Baidu was [...]

By: Google and China (3): Some updates | CHINAYOUREN

Google and China (3): Some updates | CHINAYOUREN — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:07:07 +0000

[...] right now. On the other hand, investors have little doubts about Baidu who is up 13,5%. I bet some copycat in the B offices is already starting to plot how to offer an online BDocs, BMaps, BCalendar, Bmail, [...]

By: What's up with Google in China | CHINAYOUREN

What's up with Google in China | CHINAYOUREN — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:06:41 +0000

[...] not significant in a day when the whole Nasdaq was down 1.35%. Note that Baidu fell 3.51% after my yesterday’s post, and probably the impact on Google will be seen today when the market opens. I am quite happy that [...]

By: Uln

Uln — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:42:30 +0000

What with the CTO? Any news about him? Links?

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:08:20 +0000

What about the CTO.

By: Uln

Uln — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 02:13:56 +0000

Yes, I wrote the blog a bit fast because it was breaking news. Since then I have been googling for this and seen that very similar attacks happened to Twitter and Google before, they said they were DNS attacks or redirect attacks, and similarly claimed that no security issue was involved. However, security in the broad sense is to ensure that a hacker cannot stop the service of baidu, and also to reassure the users that their data is secure. Whatever the technical reality of the attack, in these 2 main points baidu was seriously hit.

Anyway, I agree the conclusions I draw are not necessarily warranted from this single attack. It is just that coincidentally I was reading the article “Page not Found”, and the temptation to connect the 2 events was too irresistible.

But enough of this, let’s turn our eyes to the exciting Google newsd and WTF is going on with that now, thanks for the link!

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:34:15 +0000

Baidu was hit by a domain name hijack. This is more like old school social engineering hacking than a security issue so I’m not sure I really buy your assertion that concentrating on security would have helped.

The weakness here isn’t so much the domain owners as the registrars. I myself use register.com and they’re a very large outfit with a high degree of automation of transfers which leaves itself more open to this sort of thing. Although I don’t disagree on the point about innovation, it’s really quite sad to see how big Chinese sites like kaixin001 etc are blatant rip-offs of the original English-language sites.

This, I think, is rather more interesting:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html