By Reuters | Updated: 1 July 2023.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing said on Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware suppliers has led to the leak of the vendor’s company data.
“TSMC has recently been aware that one of our IT hardware suppliers experienced a cybersecurity incident which led to the leak of information pertinent to server initial setup and configuration,” the company said.
TSMC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information were not affected following the cybersecurity incident at its supplier Kinmax.
The TSMC vendor breach is part of a larger trend of significant security incidents affecting various companies and government entities.
Victims range from U.S. government departments, UK’s telecom regulator, to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw was discovered in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product last month.
TSMC said it has cut off data exchange with the affected supplier following the incident.
TSMC also announced in April that it will release new software this year to help customers working on advanced computer chips for cars take advantage of its newest technologies more quickly.
TSMC is the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of semiconductors. Many of the automotive industry’s biggest chip suppliers such as NXP Semiconductor and STMircoelectronics NV tap TSMC to make their chips.
But automotive chips must meet a higher bar for ruggedness and longevity than the chips that go into consumer electronics. TSMC has special manufacturing processes for the automotive industry that typically arrive a couple years after similar processes for consumer chips.
In the past it has then taken automotive chip firms extra time to create chip designs for those specialised manufacturing lines. The result was that car chips could be years behind those in the latest smartphone.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
