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Taiwanese PC manufacturer Acer has confirmed that a server used by its repair technicians has been hacked, with 160GB of data being compromised.
The company believes, however, that no customer data has been breached.
The first sign that things were not all well for Acer came when a threat actor posted on a popular hacking forum that they had a trove of technical data from the company. The post, dated 6 March, gives a brief precis of Acer’s business and a list of the data available for sale.
“The leak contains a total 160GB of directories, and 2,869 files,” the post read. Included are various apparently confidential slide presentations, technical manuals, back-end infrastructure details, ISO files, and “tons of BIOS stuff”, as well as ROM files.
Most alarmingly, the hacker claims to have “confidential product model documentation and information of phones, tablets, laptops, etc.”
“Honestly there’s so much shit that it’ll take me days to go through the list of what was breached,” the hacker said before asking for offers to purchase the data using the decentralised cryptocurrency Monero.
According to Bleeping Computer, the hacker provided screenshots of schematics for an Acer monitor — though it was an older model from around 2014 — as well as a handful of other documents.
In a statement sent to a number of outlets, Acer confirmed the breach.
“We have recently detected an incident of unauthorised access to one of our document servers for repair technicians,” Acer said. “While our investigation is ongoing, there is currently no indication that any consumer data was stored on that server.”
Acer is sadly no stranger to data breaches. The REvil ransomware gang targeted the company in March 2021, and in October of the same year, the company was twice hacked by the Desorden hacking group.
In both of the latter incidents, customer and employee information was breached. Hopefully, Acer’s customers will be a bit luckier this time around.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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