• Qihoo 360, a Chinese Internet security company, released a report showing that more than 40 percent of Chinese websites have security flaws.

Qihoo 360, a Chinese Internet security company, released a report showing that more than 40 percent of Chinese websites have security flaws. (Photo : REUTERS)

More than 40 percent of Chinese websites were found to be vulnerable to attacks and personal information leakage, the Global Times reported.

Based on the findings of Qihoo 360, a Chinese Internet security company, more than 1 million security loopholes were detected on websites in 2015.

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A report by Qihoo also showed that this accounts for 43.9 percent of total websites scanned, 13 percent of which had high-risk vulnerability.

According to the report, only 4.7 percent of security loopholes were fixed, and 10.3 percent of which were repaired in 24 hours while it took more than a week to fix over half of the others.

The report said that the security flaws had resulted in hacker attacks, which were mainly directed at domestic IP addresses; only 4.3 percent of the total attacks were aimed at overseas IP addresses.

The report further showed that more than 5.53 billion items of personal information could have been leaked due to vulnerabilities on 1,282 websites. In the healthcare industry, the leakage rate was alarmingly high, with every loophole resulting in 9.6 million potential loss of personal information.

Alibaba's e-commerce site Taobao claimed that hackers attempted to access over 20 million accounts on its site last year. The attempt was only reported in February.

According to a report by china.org.cn, the hackers obtained 99 million user names and passwords from a number of websites, over 20 million of which were also being used for Taobao accounts.

Alibaba discovered the breach in November after they tried inputting details in Taobao.

But more recently, the Ministry of Public Security announced that it has arrested a group of hackers that tried to hack into Taobao.com accounts, an article published by softpedia.com said.

According to an announcement on the ministry's website, the group employed some sort of automated attack and tried to hack into Taobao accounts. The names of arrested suspects were not disclosed.