China's cyber security under increasingly severe threats: forum

BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Over 7 million cyber attacks from phishing websites were blocked by Alibaba and its partners in the second half of 2012, an expert of Internet security said Thursday.

The data was disclosed by Li Qiushi, a senior manager from Risk Management Department of Alipay.com, the payment platform of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

"On average, we thwarted some 1,600 such attacks per day during the half a year. And more than 110,000 URLs of the phishing sites had been blocked," he said at the 2013 Internet Industry Security Forum held here.

"The work of anti-phishing will be long-standing battle, as the phishing gangs become more and more professional and organized," Li stressed.

A better and more comprehensive cooperation of China's Internet giants will be the key point for the next stage, he added.

The forum was held by the Internet Security Working Group of China, which was established in 2012 by seven Internet giants, including Baidu, Renren, Tencent, Sina, Microsoft, Alipay and NetEase. Qihoo 360 is also a member of the group.

China's cyber security has been under increasingly severe threats amid a variety of safety risks.

In 2012, hackers tampered with 16,388 web pages in China, including 1,802 government websites, according to a report released in March by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center.