One of the Google logos
One of the Google logosIsrael news photo: (illustrative)

A pro-Iranian Internet terror group hacked China's largest Internet search engine this week, prompting the mammoth international Google Internet firm to announce the news that it, too, had been hacked just a month earlier -- and is now seriously considering pulling out of the country.

Google said it was seriously considering yanking its operations from China after its own infrastructure was hacked, along with that of at least 20 other companies, in mid-December. Chinese human rights activists located in the United States, Europe and China had apparently been the targets of the unidentified hackers into the Google corporate infrastructure, said company officials. In addition, “dozens” of gmail accounts were also regularly breached by third parties using malware and/or phishing software on the users’ computers, rather than through a security breach at Google, the company noted.

But Google was apparently not the only target of an attempt by hackers to penetrate its corporate infrastructure: the country's largest search engine, "Baidu," a rival to Google, was also hacked this week by a pro-Iranian government group. According to the People’s Daily news web site, Internet users trying to access the Baidu home page instead encountered a message that read, “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.” Below, written in Farsi, a statement was added: “In reaction to the U.S. authorities’ intervention in Iran’s internal affairs. This is a warning.”

 

Baidu, which in September 2009 had approximately 65 percent more Chinese users than Google.cn, released a statement through spokesman Victor Tseng, saying the site’s service was interrupted “due to external manipulation of its DNS (domain name server) in the United States. Baidu has been resolving this issue and the majority of services have been restored,” he told the AFP news agency.

 

Last month, the Twitter social networking site in China was also hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army, for reasons that are still unclear. Twitter has become a vital means of communication for human rights and democracy activists in both Iran and China, where other forms of mass communication are routinely controlled and shut down by the government.

 

Following the presidential elections in Iran last June, activists relied largely on Twitter to get the word out about planned and “spontaneous” demonstrations to protest election results they insisted were rigged to keep President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.

 

Government officials did their best to jam Internet frequencies in order to block communications between the activist groups. However, the Twitter social networking site still managed for the most part to connect the dots between cities, sometimes using hubs outside the country to do so. To a certain extent, the pro-democracy movement is still active in Iran as a result, despite hundreds of arrests and even deaths of activists who were imprisoned and tortured following demonstrations against the government.

 

Likewise, in China, authorities blocked Twitter and other similar social networking sites last July after protests threatened to escalate in the far-flung western Xinjiang region, hoping to avoid scenarios similar to those in Iran.

 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu claimed the government had no connection any attempts to hack Internet sites. “We resolutely oppose hacking and other Internet crimes,” she told journalists Tuesday.

 

Chinese Google China Hacked a Month Earlier

The corporate-level hack attack into Google's infrastructure in December, termed by the company as a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack”, originated in China. The attempt failed, according to a statement released by David Drummond, senior vice president of Google’s corporate development and its chief legal officer. Nevertheless, it was the straw that may have finally broken the camel’s back.

 

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results,” Drummond wrote in the statement posted on the daily Google Blog site. “At the time we made clear that ‘we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.

 

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the Web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China,” he continued. “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Can Google-China Shutdown Affect Israeli Business Ties?

Israel has enjoyed close bilateral ties with the People’s Republic of China since 1992. The two countries have seen a rise in trade that is projected to grow to approximately $10 billion in 2010.

 

China is Israel’s largest Asian trading partner, with the two countries swapping technologies on solar energy, robotics, irrigation, construction, agricultural and water management, and desalination techniques to combat drought. China is a major exporter to Israel of high-tech products and manufactured goods. Israel, meanwhile, is China’s second-largest supplier of military equipment and arms, after Russia.

 

Millions of Israeli business owners and consumers use the Google Internet search engine for their daily surfing and business affairs, including those who conduct dealings with their Chinese counterparts. It is not clear how, if at all, any move by Google to pull out of the Asian nation might affect those dealings.