TSMC Refutes Ransomware Gang’s Claim as Third-Party Supplier Discloses Data Breach Attack

Taiwan-based TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) in a statement denied the claims of being hacked by the infamous ransomware group, LockBit. World largest chipmaker found itself on the group’s leak site due to the breach suffered by one of its IT hardware suppliers.

The perpetrators have threatened to publish the stolen data unless paid a ransom of $70 million. The alleged TSMC data includes email addresses, network entry points, and system credentials. A day before this announcement was made, a threat actor known as Bassterlord, affiliated with the Russia-linked LockBit live tweeted what appeared to be a cyberattack on TSMC, sharing screenshots of TSMC-related information.

Meanwhile, TSMC in a statement, shared with different media outlets, disclosed that they were not attacked, rather one of their outsourced hardware suppliers had suffered a LockBit hack. In the cybersecurity incident, Kinmax Technology found that data related to initial server setup and configuration had been compromised.

The company further went on to say that the incident had not affected its business operations, nor compromised any customer information. TSMC also disclosed that after confirming that none of its network system had been impacted, ‘immediately terminated its data exchange with this concerned supplier in accordance with the Company’s security protocols and standard operating procedures’’.

The impacted supplier, Kinmax released a statement on 29 June 2023, where it disclosed the cyberattack, ‘’In the morning of June 29, 2023, the Company discovered that our internal specific testing environment was attacked, [..] The leaked content mainly consisted of system installation preparation that the Company provided to our customers as default configurations. [..] The company has thoroughly investigated this incident and implemented enhanced security measures to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.’’

TSMC is said to be the largest player in the semiconductor market, worldwide. It employs more than 65,000 people with reported revenues of over $72 billion in 2022. The Taiwan-based Kinmax Technology is a systems integrator company that claims to partner with major companies like HPE, Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, Nvidia, RedHat, among others.