Intel is investigating an incident where about 20GB of its confidential files were published earlier today. These sensitive files contain information about Intel’s intellectual property belonging to its chipset, project guides and manuals, but nothing identifiable info about employees or customers.
Confidential Data of Intel Leaked Online
A Swiss software engineer named Till Kottmann has published these files to a cloud-based file sharing platform, MEGA earlier today. He claimed to have received these files worth 20GB from a hacker, who in turn claims to have breached Intel’s unsecured server hosted on the Akamai CDN, earlier this year.
The files were marked “confidential” or “restricted secret” were shared to Till Kottmann because he’s running popular Telegram channel where he’d be posting leaked data from other sources like cloud misconfiguration, unencrypted databases, web portals etc. Today’s leak was just an initial part of a series’ of Intel’s leaks, says Kottmann, as per the hacker.
After being analysed by BleepingComputer and ZDNet, the leaked files are said to be containing technical specs, manuals, product guides of CPUs dating back to 2016. It was just a trove of proprietary information but contained so sensitive data relating to either employees or Intel’s customers. Yet, the hacker claimed to have access to impersonate any employee. The summary of leaked files as below;
- Intel CEFDK (Consumer Electronics Firmware Development Kit (Bootloader stuff)) SOURCES
- Intel ME Bring up guides + (flash) tooling + samples for various platforms
- Simics Simulation for Rocket Lake S and potentially other platforms
- Kabylake (Purley Platform) BIOS Reference Code and Sample Code + Initialization code (some of it as exported git repos with full history)
- Binaries for Camera drivers Intel made for SpaceX
- Silicon / FSP source code packages for various platforms
- Schematics, Docs, Tools + Firmware for the unreleased Tiger Lake platform
- Various Intel Development and Debugging Tools
- Kabylake FDK training videos
- Various roadmaps and other documents
- Bootguard SDK (encrypted zip)
- Intel Snowridge / Snowfish Process Simulator ADK
- Some Verilog stuff for various Xeon Platforms, unsure what it is exactly.
- Intel Marketing Material Templates (InDesign)
- Debug BIOS/TXE builds for various Platforms
- Intel Trace Hub + decoder files for various Intel ME versions
- Elkhart Lake Silicon Reference and Platform Sample Code.
After reporting the leak, Intel responded saying that, “We are investigating this situation. The information appears to come from the Intel Resource and Design Center, which hosts information for use by our customers, partners and other external parties who have registered for access. We believe an individual with access downloaded and shared this data.“
