14 DAY TRIAL // A hacker group called Pakistan Cyber Army (PCA) claims to have broken into the European website of hardware manufacturer Acer and stolen the personal information of 40,000 customers.
The Hacker News reports that in addition to customer information, PCA also stole proprietary source code and had complete access to the site's FTP account.
According to screenshots released by PCA, the compromised customer information includes full names, email addresses, full home addresses (with postal code, city and country) and phone numbers.
The data is organized by country in individual Excel spreadsheets. Judging by the names of the files listed in a screenshot, the non-European Acer customers are also affected.
In addition to many European countries there are files for Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Cameroon, Egypt, Greenland, Kuwait, Malaysia, Philippines and Pakistan.
A screenshot of the hackers browsing the acer-euro.com ftp suggests the customer data was stored by Acer in an archive on the server.
The file is called "Country Wise Customer Data.zip" and contains the previously mentioned Excel spreadsheets. If true, storing this on a FTP is a major security oversight on Acer's part.
The stolen source code seems to be that of the website itself and is written in ASP. The method of compromise has not been disclosed.
Pakistan Cyber Army members made the news in December last year, when they defaced 270 websites belonging to Indian companies, educational institutions and government agencies.
The most prominent victim was the website of India’s top law enforcement agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). This is most likely the time when the group was established, because its name and first attacks were a response to defacements carried out against Pakistani government websites by a group called the Indian Cyber Army (ICA).
