It looks like some hackers in China are re-routing traffic from Google to Baidu, which is another search engine.  While Baidu has been around for quite some time and does not *currently* host any threats, its scary to know that people are able to take on the Internet giant Google and redirect all of their traffic to somewhere else.  The thing I was shocked at the most is how Google responded to the matter.  Google says they have seen this before, which means redirecting traffic from Google is not new.  In addition, both Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search engines were compromised in this manner as well.

It looks like China is hijacking web traffic from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

This morning, TechCrunch reported that at least one China-based visitor to Google Blog Search was redirected to Baidu, a search engine born and bred in the Far East, and the Silicon Valley uber-blog soon tossed up a second post that said much the same thing was happening with Microsoft and Yahoo! domains.

Similar reports have popped up in the past. In 2002, Reuters suggested that one of the country’s largest ISPs, China Telecom, was rerouting Google traffic under pressure from government authorities.

When we contacted Google, the company confirmed that the Chinese are up to their old tricks. “We’ve had numerous reports that Google.cn and other search engines have been blocked in China and traffic redirected to other sites,” said a company spokesman. “While this is clearly unfortunate, we’ve seen this happen before and are confident that service will be restored to our users in the very near future.”[more]

Tags: Hackers