Tuesday, August 10th 2021
GIGABYTE Hacked, Attackers Threaten to Leak Confidential Intel, AMD, AMI Documents
PC components major GIGABYTE has reportedly been hacked, with the attacker group, which goes by the name RansomEXX, stealing 112 GB in data that contains confidential technical documents from Intel, AMD, and others; which are released to GIGABYTE under strict NDAs, to help it design motherboards, notebooks, desktops, servers, and graphics cards. The group also deployed ransomware to encrypt GIGABYTE's data, which includes these documents. The attack allegedly occurred in the week of August 2, and GIGABYTE was forced to shut down its systems in its Taiwan headquarters. This even caused some downtime for its websites.
While it's conceivable that a company of GIGABYTE's scale would maintain timely cold backups of its data, and can recover almost everything RansomEXX encrypted, there's another aspect to this attack, and it's the data the attackers stole. They threaten to leak the data if a ransom isn't paid in time. This would put a large amount of confidential documents, including motherboard designs, UEFI/BIOS/TPM data/keys, etc., out in the public domain. GIGABYTE didn't comment on the issue beyond stating that it has isolated the affected servers from the rest of its network and notified law enforcement.
Sources:
Bleeping Computer, The Verge, The Record
While it's conceivable that a company of GIGABYTE's scale would maintain timely cold backups of its data, and can recover almost everything RansomEXX encrypted, there's another aspect to this attack, and it's the data the attackers stole. They threaten to leak the data if a ransom isn't paid in time. This would put a large amount of confidential documents, including motherboard designs, UEFI/BIOS/TPM data/keys, etc., out in the public domain. GIGABYTE didn't comment on the issue beyond stating that it has isolated the affected servers from the rest of its network and notified law enforcement.
38 Comments on GIGABYTE Hacked, Attackers Threaten to Leak Confidential Intel, AMD, AMI Documents
Would the general public benefit from such leaks? Given the size of the industry and nearly non existent competition (Intel VS AMD), I'd think so. If yes, fingers crossed. Gigabyte might learn a lesson in security and quality assurance that they desperately need. Or maybe they won't.
Conclusion - cyber secturity in some companies are terific. As far I know Enermax and Silverstone updated their websites.
Gigabyte will probably do what everyone else does - "support" deal with IT security company that will then pay ransom and decode the files.
The real deal is striking the perfect balance, so that all risks are identified and accounted for.What happened there?
It's either bad design, bad components due to component shortages or a mix of both.
Definately all those products are made by OEM partners. Taking price into account they all are not the best choices in the market. In best case scenario they just have bad price performance ratio. In the worst case scenario it happens as it happened with this PSU. Sure Gigabyte chosen MEIC as their PSU OEM manufacturer to cut manufacturing costs. The result is blown PSUs.
its funny as hell considering the recently psu blowing up GN video