Taiwanese PC and hardware manufacturer Gigabyte has suffered a ransomware attack, and hackers behind this attack claim to have copied more than 100 GB of data — including confidential documents from Intel and AMD that are not intended for the public.
Gigabyte confirmed to the Chinese news site United Daily News about the cyber attack that affected a small number of servers. After the attack was discovered, Gigabyte took the servers offline and notified law enforcement agencies.
According to Bleepingcomputer, the ransomware group RansomEXX is believed to be behind the attack. RansomEXX claims to have acquired up to 112 GB of data in the form of documents.
These documents, according to the hacker group, contain confidential material from AMD and Intel, as well as American Megatrends, one of the world’s largest hardware vendors. RansomEXX has, in fact, already warned that it is going to publish all the documents and sell them on hacker forums if no ransom is paid. The amount of the Gigabyte ransom demand is currently unknown.
Although this case is especially tricky since the interests of up to 4 different companies are involved, cybersecurity authorities always recommend not paying ransoms, despite the consequences. And the fact is that the payment of said sum is not a guarantee of anything — the hackers may also publish the documents or even worse, get paid and then re-sell copies of the documents to the highest bidder in hacker forums, making even more money.
