A hacker who took down top Chinese search engine Baidu.com last month broke into its account with a U.S. domain name registrar by make up to be from Baidu in an online chat with the registrar's tech help, according to a lawsuit filed by Baidu.

Support staffs at the registrar, Register.com, then reject to assist Baidu when first contacted about Baidu.com redirecting users to a Web page that declared, "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army," the Baidu complaint declares. The complaint was filed last month in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, but the court only recently launched an unredacted copy of the complaint.

The complaint says Baidu's service was interrupted for 5 hours by the hack and look for millions of dollars purportedly lost in revenue and other costs.
The attack began on the afternoon of Jan. 11 when the hacker contacted Register.com tech help through online chat and claimed to be from Baidu, the complaint claim. The attacker asked a support delegate to change Baidu's e-mail address on file. The delegate then sent a confirmation code to Baidu's e-mail account even though the hacker answered a security question wrongly, the complaint claims.

The attacker not able to access Baidu's e-mail account, so in its place made up a confirmation code and sent it to the support delegate when asked, the complaint claims. Without comparing the 2 codes, the support delegate took the false answer to be correct and agreed to the attacker's request to change Baidu's e-mail address on file to "antiwahabi2008@gmail.com", the complaint claims.

After that attacker used reset function for forgotten passwords to have Register.com send a new password for Baidu's account to the changed e-mail address, the complaint claims. After that attacker changed settings in Baidu's account to redirect visitors to various Web pages -- completing a procedure that took less than one hour, the complaint says.

Baidu is top online search source in China and accounts for in so far as 3 out of 4 searches in the country, as said by local consultancies. Google gets a far second place and its future in the country is unclear. Google said it planned to stop censoring results on its China-based search engine, even if that means being thrown out of the country. Google.cn is still censoring search results, but the company has said it is in talks with the government.