By Sam Boughedda
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) cloud division executives were called in for talks with Shanghai authorities as they investigate the theft of a police database.
The WSJ article states, citing people familiar with the matter, that it has added urgency to Alibaba's internal investigation. The data breach is one of the biggest in history.
The Shanghai police data was estimated to have been on nearly one billion Chinese citizens. It was offered for sale online for the equivalent of $200,000 in June.
According to the report, cybersecurity researchers claim a dashboard for database management had been left open on the public internet, with no password needed, for over a year. After scans of the database, researchers said it was hosted on Alibaba's cloud platform.
According to WSJ sources, senior management at Alibaba held a virtual emergency meeting at the start of July, after the data appeared for sale. The article names Alibaba Cloud Vice President Chen Xuesong as one of the executives called in to speak with the Shanghai authorities.