Cyber security top priority for Alibaba Cloud

By Aishah Afandi

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 7 (Bernama) -- As technology advances there is also the glaring risk of sensitive personal data being stolen by hackers.

As a company’s reputation is at risk if a cyber-attack occurs, Alibaba Cloud Malaysia General Manager Kenny Tan said security concerns is a reason why organisations fear going online.

“Our top priority at Alibaba Cloud is security, from cyber-attacks to crawlers and bot attacks,” he told Bernama.

He pointed out several incidents of data leakage which caused jitters among the public and corporates over putting data online.

For instance, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission had in 2017 said it was investigating an alleged attempt to sell the data of more than 46 million mobile phone subscribers online, in what appeared to be one of the largest leaks of customer data in Asia.

Earlier this year, it was reported that personal details of around 220,000 Malaysian organ donors and their next-of-kin had been leaked online since September 2016.

Citing an example of one its notable clients, AirAsia, Tan said the airline was reliant on the online ticketing platform, but the medium could be exploited by crawlers and bot attacks, affecting both website and application performance, while potentially exposing customer data.

In this regard, the low-cost carrier’s website and mobile application experienced massive traffic flows due to bots, which led to additional operational costs.

“The AirAsia and Alibaba Cloud security teams worked together to successfully block the illicit traffic during the initial days, thanks to an extensive database of known hackers and their patterns.

“The security teams also worked to implement stricter security checks, including custom-built captcha solutions. By working with Alibaba Cloud’s security professionals, AirAsia identified 90 per cent of the traffic to be bots. Now, we provide them with weekly security reports and regular updates,” Tan said.

He added that what happened to AirAsia, could also happen to any online website, and would be a bigger target, especially if a sale is ongoing.

To address such issues for local companies, Alibaba will be setting up the first cloud-based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Centre this month.

DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service, originating from a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack), where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet.

The Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Centre will mitigate risks and offer the highest level of protection against stronger DDoS attacks.

“The new centre will feature a variety of security functions, including Anti-DDoS Pro, a service that defends against all types of DDoS attacks. This is in line with the government’s aspiration to empower local businesses in this digital era,” Tan said.

Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo was reported as having said the technology that Alibaba Cloud rendered in Malaysia opened up new opportunities and would benefit the nation substantially towards efforts at raising competition and efficiency in this new industry.

-- BERNAMA