Earlier this week a 160 GB hoard consisting of 2869 files from Acer internal systems appeared for sale on a shady internet forum. The hacker claims to have stolen the data over the course of February 2023, and that it contains valuable files including confidential product data, technical manuals, binaries, backend infrastructure data, product model documentation, BIOS and ROM components, product keys, ISOs, and internal information on various laptops, phones, and tablets. Alongside the list of ill-gotten data they provided a snapshot of the trove to prove the authenticity, and requested payment via the cryptocurrency Monero (XMR).

Acer confirmed the breach on Tuesday to multiple sources stating:

We have recently detected an incident of unauthorized access to one of our document servers for repair technicians. While our investigation is ongoing, there is currently no indication that any consumer data was stored on that server."

Acer has been the target of a few high profile data breaches in the past few years, with one hack in 2021 recording the largest ransom price to date followed up by another smaller data breach in the same year. While this most recent hack appears to contain no personal identifying information such as customer data, there is a lot of value to be found in technical documentation and especially infrastructure data which could be used to compromise more systems in the future.