BEIJING: Alibaba shares sank upon July 15 following a report said the tech giant’s executives had been called set for meetings with Chinese officials over the theft of a vast police database.
A hacker last month put on sale the actual claimed was the private information of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens – which, if correct, would make it one of the greatest data heists of all time.
Cybersecurity experts subsequently confirmed the data – partially verified by AFP – was stored on Alibaba’s impair servers, apparently by the Shanghai police.
The company’s shares slumped 5. 7% at the open in Hong Kong on Friday, hours after The Wsj reported that Shanghai professionals had called in its executives for discussions in connection with the heist.
The Journal cited unnamed people familiar with the matter as saying the executives included Alibaba Cloud vice leader Chen Xuesong, who seem to heads the unit’s digital public safety work.
The report added that will senior managers from Alibaba and its impair unit held the virtual meeting on July 1 following a seller advertised the stolen database in a cybercrime forum.
As part of an internal investigation, company engineers have got cut access to the breached database and have started reviewing associated code, the Journal said, citing employees familiar with Alibaba’s response to the crack.
The database is believed to are already stored on Alibaba’s servers using outdated and insecure technologies.
Alibaba failed to immediately respond to an AFP request to verify the information in the report.
China maintains a sprawling nationwide monitoring network that collects huge amounts of information from its citizens, evidently for security reasons.
Beijing offers passed stronger data protection laws in recent years as public awareness of data security and privacy issues has exploded.
There are couple of ways, however , for ordinary citizens to stop the government from gathering information on them.
The sample of 750, 000 records posted online by hacker showed citizens’ names, mobile phone figures, national ID quantities, addresses, dates associated with birth and the police reports they had submitted.
The hacker wanted 10 bitcoin – around US$200, 000 (RM889, 880) at the time – for the entire database.
Some of the information appeared to have been drawn from exhibit delivery services, while other data included summaries of law enforcement incident reports within Shanghai over many years until 2019.
At least four individuals out of more than a dozen contacted by AFP last week confirmed their details were listed in the database. – AFP