Hackers steal 20 million Alibaba users' details

Chinese officials revealed a massive hack on internet giant Alibaba.

As media Paul Carsten explains, weakness in the company's cloud service is indicative of a much wider problem across China.

However, Chinese state media said hackers tried to access over 20 million active accounts on the Taobao shopping site.

Inputting login details from a stolen database of 99 million, they found nearly 21 million of the usernames were also being used for Taobao accounts.

And, in November 2015, attempts to access those accounts were detected.

Owner Alibaba advised customers to change their passwords and Chinese police have now made arrests in connection with the attempted hack.

"Alibaba's system was never breached," a spokesman said.

Alibaba says Taobao has more than 300 million customers. (Reuters/NAN)