Thursday, July 7th 2022
AMD is Investigating a Potential 450 Gb Data Breach
RansomHouse, a newly established group aimed at monetizing stolen data, claims to own more than 450 Gb of data coming from AMD. The RansomHouse group is structured as the middleman and makes sure that hackers and victims negotiate to get the funds to hackers and data back to victims. It is claimed that the leaked AMD data contains network files, system information, and AMD passwords. This could be a very dangerous data breach, as inter-company passwords are used to access confidential files and personal information. The group notes that they own 450 Gb or gigabits of data, which translates into 56.25 GB or gigabytes of stolen data. We are not yet sure if the Gb notation is misspelled. It is claimed that AMD's poor security practices like using "password" passwords lead to the data breach, and no special ransomware software was used.
Tom's Hardware reached out to AMD for a statement, and got the following response:
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Tom's Hardware reached out to AMD for a statement, and got the following response:
AMD Representative for Tom's HardwareAMD is aware of a bad actor claiming to be in possession of stolen data from AMD. An investigation is currently underway.
46 Comments on AMD is Investigating a Potential 450 Gb Data Breach
Storage is usually measured on GB, but they may be talking about something they noticed on the wire, there Gb is more common.
I'm fairly confident the "Gb" prefix is the ransomware group being noobsticks themselves, and they mean GBs.
The size of the breach is pretty much irrelevant (still, the choice of measurement unit is strange). I mean, if they stole 50GB of 4k video, that's next to nothing. If 50GB of plain text files were exfiltrated, that is an enormous amount, with a good chance of containing something really sensitive.
nl.hardware.info/nieuws/82048/450gb-met-password-beveiligde-data-gestolen-van-amd
As for the question "implying there are ulterior motives": seriously, dude, please stop reading things into simple words that are not there. The question is an open and explicitly non-loaded one: "What?" as in, incredulity and confusion. A desire to inflate the numbers is one possible explanation, sure, but you're actually arguing that asking the question is inherently suggesting this, which ... well, boggles the mind. You're reading this as a pointed rhetorical move that it simply isn't. Heck, if anything the incredulity is there in part to highlight how pointless such exaggeration would be.
And, to be clear, even if that was the suggestion - I did touch on the weirdness of this exaggeration, after all - even that isn't inherently angled as "there's a conspiracy against AMD". IMO a reasonable interpretation would be that the hacker group might be trying to brag or pass off what they've done as larger scale than what it was - which is also reflected in the kinda-incredulous "what?" at the end of the sentence, as that would be pretty weird. Explaining this through incompetence/oversight is equally weird - I would kind of assume someone with the combination of social engineering and technical skills required to pull something like this off would have the general wherewithal to not confuse GB with Gb. Heck, for all we know this could be written on a phone and thus be a product of bad autocorrect. Who knows? Either way, it's weird. And that's all that was implied by my post.
Oh, wait! There are no backdoors! ;)
;) That’s pretty crazy and one would think doubtful. Where I work we have to change all our passwords quarterly and have to contain numbers, letters lower and upper case and be at least 12 characters long.
There you have it.
On the other hand, they should have a system that catches words and forces them to have actually random passwords, like "Wt8YK2ZMJWGv"
www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/the-logic-behind-three-random-words
Who here really believes a hacker when they "pinky swear" they deleted al that data? More likely, they are getting paid TWICE ( one to get the data back, and then another on the closed market. for lots of random of data.)
Sure, its less destructive that publishing it on the open web, but it sets you up as an easy mark ( so long-term, it will cost you more to pay multiple times than a massive security audit + redesign following the first dump of data)
When they implemented the quarterly change later you have never seen such whining from adults.
Prosecution is definitely the solution!
:D