China's most popular search engine, Baidu, has been targeted by the Iranian Cyber Army hacker group. Site users were sent to a server displaying a political message and it took Baidu four hours to get control.

The ICA was involved in a similar attack on the blogging service Twitter. It sends users to a page with an Iranian flag and message in Farsi. This is perfectly useless as Baidu readers are less likely to understand Farsi despite it being the language of trade for a thousand years. The hackers tampered with Baidu's domain name registration in the United States, leading to inaccessibility.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos said that in China, Baidu outranks Google as the search engine of choice, receiving millions of visits every day. That makes it an extremely attractive target for cybercriminals. He said it was possible the hackers changed the lookup, meaning whenever surfers entered baidu.com into their browsers they were instead taken to a website that wasn't under the search engine's control.

It is just as well the Iranians were obsessed with writing a political message that no one would have understood. If the third party website had contained malware then millions of computers could have been infected and identities stolen.