Alibaba had a huge leak and data of 1 million users are stolen. Surfing the web is an activity that over time demands greater caution, given the different strategies applied by hackers to get hold of our data.
User data of 1 billion people are stolen from Alibaba
However, they are not the only ones who fall into this type of action, as it was recently discovered that a marketing consultant applied for months a web scraping procedure on the e-commerce platform Alibaba, taking advantage of sensitive data ranging from user names to phone numbers.
For those unfamiliar with the term, web scraping is a practice in which web pages are crawled for text containing private information and then stored and exploited for various purposes. It should be noted that this is not done manually but through software programs designed to replicate the browsing pattern of a human on the Internet.
As for what happened, it was determined that the person responsible was an employee of the consulting firm involved who provided services for Taobao, an online store, the largest owned by Alibaba.
According to what was ruled by a court in China, this employee, since 2019, carried out the extraction of more than one billion data of users and buyers, to then offer them to their business customers.
As a consequence of this action, the Chinese court in charge of the case has imposed a sentence of more than 3 years behind bars to the employee and his employer, as well as several fines that together total $70,260.
Alibaba subsequently issued a statement where it affirmed that none of the affected customers’ data was sold to third parties and that this did not cause any financial loss to any of them.
However, in a country like China, this kind of fact is not something isolated, having become a very common practice, which is why the government of that country decided to further tighten measures concerning the handling of information collected daily by Internet giants, including Alibaba.
