A group of cyber mercenaries targeted Baidu's driverless car technology prompting the tech company to go as far as reaching out to its rivals to help beef up its security.
The firm's head of cybersecurity Ma Jie told Bloomberg it's unclear who targeted the Baidu's proprietary information, but that company officials do know that someone tried to hire underground hackers to steal the information.
To combat this and future threats, Baidu went as far as teaming up with rival tech companies Tencent and Alibaba in order to counter these types of attacks in the future.
"The underground industry is getting bigger, and getting stronger so we must help each other against the whole underground industry," Ma told the publication. "We're not enemies, they are the enemy."
Last August, Ford and Baidu invested a combined total of $150 million in connected car tech with the goal of lowering the production costs of the Velodyne's LiDAR sensors, laser based sensors that perform similar to radar, to help accelerate its adoption into connected vehicle.
