Intel And Canon Are The Latest To Suffer A Massive Security Breach

It's open season again on large tech companies as hackers take advantage of reduced working hours, especially on-site. Garmin recently suffered a major outage due to a ransomware attack and while that news is still fresh, other companies have apparently fallen victim so security breaches as well. That said, camera maker Canon has yet to publicly acknowledge that it has indeed been hit by ransomware while Intel claims that the alleged security breach is actually just a case of an authorized person leaking confidential company data.

Several of Canon's websites and online services have been inaccessible in the past days and while the company admits that user data was lost, it didn't explain why. Files that were affected included photos and videos on users' 10GB long-term cloud storage and it's quite understandable if affected users are not amused.

Canon hasn't yet issued a more substantial explanation but operators of the Maze ransomware took credit for pilfering 10TB worth of the company's data, including private databases. Curiously, Maze denied having any hand with an earlier outage of Canon's cloud storage service. As of this writing, there is still no word on the extent of the security breach or how much of users' private information has been affected.

While Intel's situation might be less worrying for users and customers, it might be an even bigger headache for the company in the long run. Although the subset of leaked data didn't include sensitive information about Intel's customers and employees, there is also no assurance that the rest of the stolen data doesn't have those pieces. What is known at this point is that the stolen data includes a ton of information on Intel's products dating all the way back from 2016.

Intel claims that the information was downloaded from its Resource and Design Center for business partners by a person who actually had proper access and was then just leaked to unauthorized individuals. The hacker behind the incident, however, claims otherwise and that the data was lifted from unsecured database servers instead.