BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA) said that hackers tried to access over 20 million active accounts on the Taobao shopping site.
Alibaba said it protected the vast majority of those Taobao accounts by blocking hackers' access attempts, but some attacks on a small number of accounts weren't intercepted.
An Alibaba spokesman reportedly said that Suspects have already been arrested.
According to Alibaba, the suspects tried to gain access to the Taobao accounts by using account login information that had been stolen from other websites. As some people use the same usernames and passwords for multiple websites, the stolen information matched that of 20.59 million Taobao accounts. Alibaba' security team detected the attempts and blocked the vast majority of them.
As the attacks used login information stolen from other sites, Alibaba's own system was never breached, the company spokesman reportedly said.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX