Baidu Sliced By Iranian Cyberthugs?

2010-01-13

China's top search engine Baidu was hacked on Tuesday in what state media said was an attack by a pro-Iranian government group that replaced the usual home page with an Iranian flag. (Yahoo!)

This story broke yesterday and is all over the news today, but I have yet to see some real, juicy, hardcore, I-forgot-to-take-my-antipsychotic-meds-type conspiracy theorizing from our usual friends on the Interweb.

Since no one else has stepped up to the plate, allow me. Let's take a look at the facts:

1. Baidu's homepage was hacked.

2. A big fat image with the name of the alleged Iranian cyberthug group was uploaded to the page. [UPDATE: The image was apparently on another page that users were directed to.]

3. Baidu is one of China's most heavily-travelled sites. An image on the Baidu homepage is guaranteed to be seen by a gazillion Chinese citizens.

4. China and Iran have fairly good relations, motivated primarily because of that vaguely soy saucey stuff seeping out of the ground in the desert over there in the Middle East.

5. Iran has been pursuing a nuclear program, which some say includes nuclear weapons capabilities.

6. Many countries in the West, including the U.S., have been pressing for sanctions against Iran. China has been a vociferous opponent of (some of the) sanctions, and stands firm against other, more Cheneyesque dickish military invasion sorts of activities.

7. The U.S./West needs China's support against Iran.

I don't think you need to be Glenn Beck to figure out that the real hackers are . . . the CIA.

Second possibility: the Illuminati, or maybe Jay Chou (I've heard he's a Neocon). I think the CIA has an edge, though, on funding and institutional know-how for this sort of thing. The attack was made from U.S. servers, of course.

Wait, you don't think maybe Baidu did it to themselves? Everyone knows they're controlled by a consortium of pro-Israeli Wall Street Jews who would love to pave the way for a military strike against Iran. It all makes sense now!

Unless that's what Jay Chou wants us to think . . .

I'll update this later after Nurse Ratched comes by with morning meds.

Tags: China News