With attacks from China and pressure from the U.S., can TSMC maintain its edge?
Illustration by Sam Ward
Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.
Sometime in the fall of 2019, IT staff at an unnamed semiconductor firm in Taiwan noticed a user’s account behaving oddly. Concerned, they called Benson Wu, who runs a cybersecurity firm in New Taipei City, to help investigate.
Wu and his team at CyCraft began probing the network of the company, and they confirmed the IT staff’s suspicions: the firm had been hacked. Eight accounts and 24 computers had been compromised, giving the attackers broad access to the company’s network and files.
In many cases, it might have ended there. The company’s IT group might have wiped the infected computers, rooted out the compromised accounts, and moved on. But what Wu found unsettled him. The attackers’ tactics matched those of another intrusion staged against one of his longtime clients, also a vendor in the semiconductor industry. The difference was, with this company,
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