Baidu Files Lawsuit Against US-based Registrar

China’s leading search engine, Baidu.com, has filed a legal suit against its US-based domain name service (DNS) provider, Register.com, for allegedly letting the hackers infiltrate its networks that led to the site’s outage and marred the company’s image badly.

The search engine filed a lawsuit against the US-based Internet domain registrar in the Manhattan federal court in New York, in which it has sought for unspecified damages under the Lanham Act for trademark violation, infringement of the contract, as well as “gross negligence”.

“Baidu's account was vandalized so that Internet traffic intended for Baidu and accessed through the 'baidu.com' domain name was misdirected to a web page depicting an Iranian flag and a broken Star of David”, according to the court document.

However, Baidu asserted that it wasn’t much affected by the outage caused by attack on its Chinese search site ‘Baidu.com.cn’. 

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Incidentally, Baidu holds a massive 62.2 percent share of the Chinese search market, followed by Google, which has market share of 14.1 percent, as per the November figures from ComScore. Register.com has lambasted the lawsuit by terming it as “completely without merit”.

Responding to Baidu’s lawsuit, a spokeswoman for Register.com said: “Register.com takes cyber-terrorism very seriously and we are working closely with federal law enforcement officials who are investigating this crime as well as the recent similar attacks on Twitter and Google”.