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Beijing punishes Alibaba for not reporting Log4j loophole fast enough

An Alibaba engineer found the world-threatening software vulnerability, but the company gets no rewards.

Two men pictured in an Alibaba company parking lot

An Alibaba cloud security engineer was the first person to find and report a significant cybersecurity loophole.

Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

An Alibaba engineer found the world-threatening software vulnerability related to Log4j, but instead of getting rewarded, the company was disciplined by the Chinese regulator for not telling authorities soon enough. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology decided to suspend a cybersecurity partnership with Alibaba Cloud for six months, the Chinese publication 21st Century Business Herald reported Wednesday.

According to Bloomberg, an Alibaba cloud security engineer named Chen Zhaojun was the first person to find and report a significant flaw in the open-source software tool Log4j that’s widely used by companies worldwide. Chen notified Apache, the nonprofit foundation maintaining the software tool, on Nov. 24. But MIIT, China’s top tech regulator, only became aware of the flaw 15 days later on Dec. 9 through a cybersecurity report, likely not submitted by Alibaba.

A recent Chinese regulation named “Provisions on Security Loopholes of Network Products” went in effect in September. The provisions required that any Chinese company report the vulnerabilities it found to product providers immediately and to a Chinese loophole information sharing platform within two days.

Zeyi Yang

Zeyi Yang is a former reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick.

miitcybersecuritylog4jcloudalibaba
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