China's top Internet search engine Baidu said Wednesday it had sued a US web firm after its site was hacked, a new salvo in a growing spat after Google's threat to quit the country because of cyber attacks, reported AFP.
"Today Baidu filed a lawsuit against its domain name registration service provider Register.com, Inc. in a US court in New York, seeking damages over the incident of Baidu's service interruption last week," the Chinese firm said.
Nasdaq-listed Baidu said its site went down for hours after the January 12 attack by a group identifying itself as the "Iranian Cyber Army", the name used by hackers who briefly shut down the Twitter microblogging site last month.
Baidu spokesman Victor Tseng said at the time that service had been interrupted "due to external manipulation of its DNS (Domain Name Server) in the United States".
In its statement Wednesday, Baidu said the software behind its domain name "was unlawfully and maliciously altered" as a result of the "gross negligence" of Register.com.
This led to "users from many places around the world being unable to access the Baidu website for a number of hours and causing serious damages to Baidu".
Register.com is a leading domain registration service that manages more than 2.5 million domain names, according to the company's website. Officials there were not available for immediate comment.
