Week 9: Acer Confirms Breach After Hacker Offers to Sell Stolen Data

One of the largest electronics manufacturers, Acer, has been hacked. The hacker of this breach is offering to sell 160 Gb of data stolen from their systems, however, there is still no sign that consumer data was leaked from the breached server. 

The hacker claimed the data was stolen in mid-February, and he also informed the potential buyers that the sale of the data will be on a well-known cybercrime forum for Monero cryptocurrency.  Those files are said to contain confidential slides, staff manuals, confidential product documentation, binary files, information on backend infrastructure, disk images, replacement digital product keys, and BIOS-related information.

Breaches like this one are unfortunately not unusual for Acer. In 2021, the servers in India and Taiwan were targeted and breached. The hackers stole more than 60 Gb of data from the company's systems.

Big companies being targeted and breached is nothing new, but the fact that this happened multiple times makes me believe that they need a stronger cybersecurity team or cybersecurity consultants because a good reputation in the computer field is highly profitable.