Voice of America news site knocked off by Iranian Cyber Army

The Voice of America news site of the Government of America went offline temporarily on Monday after a pro-Iran cyber activist group, referred to as the Cyber Army, changed the domain name settings of the site, leading visitors to a different site controlled by the group.

PCWorld reports that it is the same group that had attacked China's top search engine enterprise Baidu and the Twitter websites about a year ago.

A statement posted on the Facebook page of Voice of America a day after the attack confirmed the fact: On Monday, February 21, VOANews.com's primary domain, along with numerous related domains registered with Network Solutions, was hacked by an unknown party. This enabled the hacker to redirect VOA URLs to a site claiming to be run by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army.

However, VOA also clarified that no data was lost or compromised as a result of the hacking attack.

During the time that VOANews was under attack, visitors to the site were redirected to a page that apparently addressed U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and called on the U.S. to stop interfering in the affairs of Islamic countries. Starting with an assertion We have proven that we can, it went on to say Islamic world doesn't believe US trickery.

The Washington Times reported on Tuesday that an Iranian government official has attributed the attack to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian militia formed following the 1979 revolution. The state-controlled Press TV quoted an IRGC top-gun owning responsibility for the attack by the Cyber Army, claiming it to be proof of the power and capability of the group in the cyber arena.