Like Alexander, Intel is in the midst of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad stretch of its own, and things just got worse with an unauthorized, massive data dump of internal documents. It contains more than 20GB of confidential files, and the person responsible says a whole lot more is on the way.
A link to the data was posted by Till Kottmann (via Tom's Hardware), a Swiss IT Consultant who says this is the "first 20GB release in a series of large Intel leaks."
"Most of the things here have NOT been published ANYWHERE before and are classified as confidential, under NDA or Intel Restricted Secret," Kottmann added.
It is an extensive leak containing various schematics and other confidential details Intel shares with its hardware partners to develop products of their own, such as motherboards and BIOS code.
The folks at ArsTechnica have been analyzing the contents of the extensive data dump and say the bulk of it applies to Intel's CPU platforms, including Tiger Lake, which has not yet been released. They also found documents related to other projects, including a sensor package Intel built for SpaceX.
According to Kottmann, the anonymous leaker behind the data dump "breached" Intel to obtain the data, though Intel does not believe that is the case.
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"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," Intel said in a statement.
In a conversation between Kottmann and the anonymous source, the source claims they found the data hosted on server that wasn't properly secured.
"Another funny thing is that on the zip files you may find password protected. Most of them use the password Intel123 or a lowercase intel123," the source said.
If either of those were actually the passwords, it's unlikely the folders contained top secret information. Nevertheless, the situation is not a good look for Intel.
