Intel may have been the target of a hacker attack that caused the source code of the ecosystem that includes its 12th generation Core processors to leak. According to information published by the VX-Underground last Friday (07), the criminals would have stolen a total of 5.86 GB of data from the BIOS/UEFI of “Alder Lake” platforms.
As discovered by the user @glowingfreak of Twitter, the hackers would have hosted the BIOS source code of the Alder Lake ecosystem on Github itself and released the material on a 4chan forum — an unusual practice for this type of leak, since it is confidential material from a company. renowned.
The source code for the Intel Alder Lake has been leaked online.
* Alder Lake CPU was released November 4, 2021
* Source code is 2.8GB (compressed)
* Leak (allegedly) from 4chan
* We have not reviewed the entirety of the code base, it is massive— vx-underground (@vxunderground) October 8, 2022
Experts have yet to confirm the veracity of the files allegedly leaked on September 30. Based on the codes, it is still impossible to deduce whether the source is Intel itself or a hardware partner manufacturer such as ASUS or Gigabyte, but one of the documents mentions Lenovo features.
The files appear to be related to BIOS/UEFI and 600 series chipsets such as power 12th Gen Core processors released in 2021. The consequences of this leak are still unclear, but any sensitive information that has a direct impact on the security of the platforms will be a critical issue for Intel.
The TPM (Trusted Platform Module), a hardware-based security platform that became very popular with the release of Windows 11, is an example of confidential information that could be contained in the chipset firmware, as they have full integration with the components. from the motherboard.
If the information theft proves to be true, Intel would add to a list of hardware manufacturers that have suffered hacker attacks in recent months, such as AMD, NVIDIA and Samsung, which may have been targeted by the same group of cybercriminals. For now, the “blue team” has not commented on the matter.
