Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing said on Friday that a cybersecurity incident involving one of its IT hardware vendors led to the leak of the vendor’s company data.
“TSMC has recently become aware that one of our IT hardware vendors experienced a cybersecurity incident that led to the leak of information pertinent to the installation and initial configuration of the server,” the company said.
TSMC confirmed in a statement to Reuters that its business operations or customer information was not affected by the cybersecurity incident at its provider Kinmax.
The TSMC vendor breach is part of a broader trend of significant security incidents affecting various businesses and government entities.
Victims range from US government departments, the UK telecoms regulator to energy giant Shell, all affected since a security flaw in Progress Software’s MOVEit Transfer product was discovered last month. .
TSMC said it cut off data sharing with the affected provider after 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 their newest technologies more quickly.
TSMC is the world’s largest contract semiconductor manufacturer. Many of the largest chip suppliers to the automotive industry, such as NXP Semiconductor and STMircoelectronics NV, turn to TSMC to manufacture their chips.
But automotive chips must meet a higher standard of robustness and longevity than chips used in consumer electronics. TSMC has special manufacturing processes for the auto industry that typically come a couple of years after similar processes for consumer chips.
In the past, automotive chip companies needed more time to create chip designs for those specialized manufacturing lines. The result was that car chips could be years behind those in the latest smartphone.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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