It is full-on damage control at Gigabyte’s headquarters after they were hit with a ransomware attack on August 9th. With the Taiwanese hardware giant trying to stop a Gigabyte data leak after confirming their system was compromised.
According to the spokesperson for Gigabyte:
- Hackers somehow gained access to a few internal servers at Gigabyte’s headquarters
- Those servers were very quickly identified and isolated
- Gigabyte has assured everyone that this system had nothing to do with their production facilities. And production will not be affected by this attack.
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The Dark Web Ransom
While Gigabyte has downplayed the extent of the ransomware attack, journalists at The Record have managed to locate the ransomware demands posted on the Dark Web.
According to the extortion note posted by Ransome, a notorious black hat hacking group know for creating ransomware attacks on high-profile companies, they have access to 112 GB worth of internal gigabyte files. And unless their demands are met, these files will be released to the public.
What Is A Ransomware Attack?
- Ransomware, as the name suggests is a cyber-attack with the intent of extorting money out of an induvial or company.
- Usually, when a single person is hit with a ransomware attack, their files are all encrypted. The hacker demands money in exchange for the encryption key. Failure to give in to these demands means that you won’t be able to get access to your data, which can be your personal files or even work files.
- Ransomware attacks on big companies like Gigabyte work in a similar fashion. But like in this case, hackers are threatening to release confidential information to the Public.
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What Is The Confidential Information?
It can range from a dozen of different things. It can include designs for new products, proprietary research, sensitive encryption keys, etc.:
Gigabyte is famous for its motherboards and GPUs. More concerning is that this hack has comprised data of other companies as well like AMD and Intel that work closely with Gigabyte.
Snippets of the leaked information show Intel Ice Lake-D SKU stack update and AMD’s revisions guides. Putting more pressure on Gigabyte to comply, since a lot of this information is under Non-Disclosure Agreements:
And despite not being sure about the legalities of this, we are pretty sure it won’t look good on Gigabyte if they become the source of a proprietary information leak for Intel or AMD.
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Not The First Time
This isn’t the first cyber-attack on a Taiwanese-based tech company this year. Acer was similarly attacked by another hacker group calling themselves REvil. They demanded a massive $50 million. They went as far as to post-auction listing for the extracted Acer data on ‘Leak sites’ on the dark web.
It is becoming clearer each and every day that cybersecurity threats are persistent and aren’t going away. And each year, companies are spending more and more resources to secure their valuable information. But sometimes even that is not enough.
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