SHANGHAI — Hackers have attempted to access the accounts of millions of users on Taobao, China’s largest consumer-to-consumer e-commerce marketplace, which is owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
The hackers obtained a database of almost 100 million and usernames from multiple Web sources; more than 20 million of these usernames were being used for multiple platforms, including Taobao accounts.
“They rented AliCloud to do what’s known as ‘mapping,’ the process of pulling a bunch of account names and honing down to a part group that is relevant, in this case, the Taobao platform. While they were doing this, they were detected and subsequently reported to the police,” an Alibaba spokesman told WWD.
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In responding to initial reports, Alibaba was quick to emphasize that the attempt was a common occurrence in the industry, and the issue was not specific to the company’s cloud computing arm, AliCloud, as the culprits could have used any cloud computing service to do the same thing.
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“The crooks were pretty dumb to use AliCloud to do the mapping,” said a Shanghai-based programmer and expert on cyber security, who requested anonymity. “It is very easy to detect the mapping — the repeated attempts to go to each user’s name when it all comes from a single place.”
When the hackers tried to access Taobao user accounts, even if they matched usernames and passwords, they had already been blocked by Alibaba’s security.
Local authorities have since detained those responsible for the attempted hack.
Taobao, a site often compared with eBay, has more than 500 million registered consumer accounts and commands an 80 percent share of China’s consumer-to-consumer market, according to Alibaba’s own estimates.
Alibaba has recently signaled its seriousness about expanding its cloud computing business, known as AliCloud, more aggressively in 2016. Last month China’s tech giant revealed plans to enlist 1,000 developers to work on its big-data platform over the next three years.
AliCloud is planning to invest $1 billion to compete with Amazon.com Inc. in computing services, as well as to keep up with their own information processing needs, which continue to grow as China’s e-commerce market grows. Cloud computing services have proven to be one of Amazon’s fastest growing businesses and have become a huge contributor to the U.S. Web giant’s profits.
Bain & Co. estimates China’s online retail market will grow to 10 trillion yuan, or $1.5 billion, by 2020.