Hackers hit Dell product demo platform, but impact is limited

Tech manufacturer Dell said a hacker breached a product demonstration platform in a recent incident, but told Recorded Future News that no sensitive information was involved. 

In a statement, the company said a threat actor gained access to Dell’s Solution Center, a platform “designed to demonstrate our products and test proofs-of-concept for Dell’s commercial customers.”

A Dell spokesperson said the site is “intentionally separated from customer and partner systems, as well as Dell’s networks and is not used in the provision of services to Dell customers.”

Additionally, data used in the platform is primarily fake, pulled from publicly available datasets used solely for product demonstration purposes and other tasks, the spokesperson said. “Based on our ongoing investigation, the data obtained by the threat actor is primarily synthetic, publicly available or Dell systems/test data.”

Dell is one of the largest computer hardware manufacturers in the world, reporting $95.6 billion in earnings for the last fiscal year.

Dell did not say when the incident occurred or what group was behind the attack, but the WorldLeaks ransomware gang appeared to claim that it was behind the incident.

The group is a revamp of Hunters International, which shut down three weeks ago and provided free decryption software to previous victims. The gang was responsible for high-profile attacks on the U.S. Marshals Service, Namibia’s state-owned telecom provider and a prominent cancer center based in Seattle.

The actors behind Hunters International created WorldLeaks in November and cybersecurity firm Group-IB assessed that some of the WorldLeaks and Hunters administrators may previously have been involved in the Hive operation, which was infiltrated and shut down by law enforcement in 2023.

Last week, incident responders from Google tied a recent campaign of threat actors stealing sensitive data from organizations through end-of-life appliances made by cybersecurity company SonicWall to actors from WorldLeaks.