Alibaba praised for supporting fight against cybercrime

Tech giant Alibaba has helped Chinese police uncover more than 8,000 cybercrime cases since the start of 2017, including internet fraud, blackmail and personal data theft, according to a company statement on Tuesday.

Public security authorities nationwide have also broken up more than 1,000 cybercrime gangs and detained 6,799 suspects, it said.

Alibaba runs an online platform for citizens to report cybercrime, and the company said its data collection services and artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies are frequently used by police to fight crime.

Liang Bin, deputy director of cybersecurity management for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, praised Alibaba for supporting the government's efforts to protect the online environment at the opening ceremony of a two-day cybersecurity summit in Beijing on Tuesday. The summit was arranged by the Internet Society of China and Alibaba.

Zheng Junfang, the tech company's chief platform governance officer, said Alibaba is exploring more methods and technologies to combat online crime.

She called on more enterprises to contribute to the effort, "as no one can solve security problems alone".

"In addition, we need more communication and cooperation on data protection and information sharing between enterprises and governmental departments," Zheng added.

The summit includes a series of forums, including on online intellectual property protection and AI security, Alibaba's statement added.