Alibaba faces 300m hack attempts daily

Alibaba founder Jack Ma, said the company thwarts 300.0m hack attempts each day and has yet to lose “one cent” to hackers.

Ma also said that Alipay, the group’s payments arm, processed $50bn of daily transactions and was a clear target for cyber attacks.

Speaking at the Forbes Global Ceo Conference in Singapore on Tuesday, Ma said that he was proud of the Chinese technology giant: “For Alibaba Group, we have over 300.0m hacking attempts per day. Every day. But we deal (with) it. We don’t have even one problem.

“We teach the machine all the ways people (are) cheating,” said Ma. “The machine remembers over millions of ways of cheating, so when we start the cheating, (the) machine already knows you are cheating. In this way we are protecting all the technology.”

He added that such security is possible thanks to the company’s vast swathes of customer data. The data allows Alibaba to detect bad human actors.

“Give my data to a machine. I trust a machine more than (I) trust people.

“I give my data to people, I worry about that. People say ‘ah, this is Jack Ma, I want to know about him.’ Machine (s) don’t care if you’re Jack Ma or Jack Lee. Machine cares whether you do good things or bad things,” he said.

Alibaba faced a sweeping cyber attack attempt in February, which threatened to compromise the accounts of 20.0m users on its Taobao e-commerce site. The company said that it had detected the attack “in the first instance.”