Acer Philippines disclosed a data breach after a third-party vendor hack
March 13, 2024
Acer Philippines disclosed a data breach after employee data was leaked by a threat actor on a hacking forum.
Acer Philippines confirmed that employee data was compromised in an attack targeting a third-party service provider.
Acer Inc. is a Taiwanese multinational company that produces computer hardware and electronics,
Acer is investigating the security breach with the help of cybersecurity experts and notified the National Privacy Commission (NPC) and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) in the Philippines.
The hacked third-party company manages the Acer employee attendance data. Threat actors, that go online with the moniker ph1ns, leaked the stolen data on a hacking forum claiming that it was stolen from the HR department of the Taiwanese company.
‘ph1ns’ published a link to a database containing stolen data.
ph1ns told Bleeping Computer that Acer was hacked, but threat actors did not deploy any ransomware.
They also highlighted that they were not blackmailing the company, however, they wiped data on the breached systems.
Acer is aware of the data breach, but pointed out that a limited set of employees has been impacted and no customer data has been compromised. The Acer’s infrastructure was not impacted by the incident.
It isn’t the first time that Acer suffered a security breach, in March 2023 the Taiwanese multinational hardware and electronics corporation disclosed a data breach after a threat actor claimed the hack of the company
A threat actor announced the availability for sale of 160 GB of data allegedly stolen from the Taiwanese multinational hardware and electronics corporation.
The threat actor announced the hack on a popular cybercrime forum, he claimed the theft of about 2869 files. The stolen files include confidential product model documentation, binaries, backend infrastructure, BIOS information, and other sensitive data.
In October 2021, the tech giant was hacked twice in a week, the same threat actor (Desorden) initially breached some of its servers in India, then he claimed to have also breached some systems in Taiwan.
In March 2021, the REvil ransomware group hacked the company and demanded a record ransom payment of $50 million.
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Pierluigi Paganini
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, data breach)