Acer is a huge hardware and electronics company that's based in Taiwan. The organization has a headquarters in the United States and has a presence in dozens of countries around the world. The organization has an approximate revenue of $277 billion annually and employs thousands of individuals. Acer was recently the victim of a serious cyber attack.
We don't have all the specifics, but the Acer data breach likely occurred because a hacker took advantage of a server security vulnerability or the attacker tricked one of the company workers into allowing a malicious file within the network. Once the file server was compromised, the hacker was able to withdraw a significant number of company files from the server.
According to the attacker, the Acer data was stolen in the middle of February 2023. There is no way to verify that this was when the attack occurred, but the information was posted for sale shortly after that date, so it seems likely.
The Acer data breach currently only appears to be affecting the company itself. The hackers responsible for the attack claim they've obtained proprietary information from the company, including things like staff manuals, product documentation, disk images, replacement product keys, and more. There is no way to know if the information stolen actually includes those confidential documents or not, but Acer doesn't believe that any consumer information was stolen due to this attack.
According to the hacker attempting to sell Acer information, approximately 2,800 files, totaling 160 Gb of space, were stolen from the company. The attacker is attempting to sell the files for payment in Monero cryptocurrency coins.