Alibaba shares fell on Friday after a report said the tech giant’s executives were summoned to meet Chinese officials over the theft of a massive police database.
A hacker last month allegedly put the personal information of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens up for sale – which, if true, would make it one of the biggest data breaches in history.
Cybersecurity analysts then confirmed that the data — partially verified by AFP — was stored on Alibaba’s cloud servers, apparently by the Shanghai police.
Shares of the company fell 5.7 percent at the Hong Kong opening on Friday, hours after the Wall Street Journal reported that Shanghai authorities had invited their executives to attend talks related to the raid.
The Journal quoted unnamed people familiar with the matter as saying the executives included Alibaba Cloud’s vice president Chen Xuesong, who directs the work of the digital public security unit.
The report added that senior executives from Alibaba and its cloud unit held a virtual meeting on July 1 after a vendor promoted the stolen database on a cybercrime forum.
As part of an internal investigation, the company’s engineers have blocked access to the compromised database and have begun reviewing associated code, the Journal said, citing employees familiar with Alibaba’s response to the hack.
It is believed that the database was stored on Alibaba’s servers using outdated and insecure technology.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to an AFP request to confirm the information in the report.
China maintains an extensive nationwide surveillance network that collects vast amounts of data from its citizens, ostensibly for security purposes.
Beijing has enacted stricter privacy laws in recent years as public awareness of data security and privacy issues has grown.
However, there are few ways for ordinary citizens to stop the government from collecting information about them.
The sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker contained citizens’ names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, dates of birth and the police reports they had filed.
The hacker wanted 10 Bitcoin – around $200,000 at the time – for the entire database.
Some of the information appeared to come from express delivery services, while other data included summaries of reports of police incidents in Shanghai spanning more than a decade through 2019.
At least four of more than a dozen people contacted by AFP last week confirmed their details were included in the database.
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