Now, it turns out that the calculator virus outbreak at Taiwan chipmaker was the upshot of a variant of WannaCry—a massive ransomware attack that wreaked havoc across the globe yesteryear shutting downward hospitals, telecom providers, as well as many businesses inwards May 2017.
TSMC nigh downward an entire 24-hour interval of production this weekend afterward several of its factories systems were halted yesteryear a calculator virus inwards the middle of the ramp-up for chips to live on used yesteryear Apple's hereafter lines of iPhones, which could comport on revenue yesteryear approx $256 million.
According to the semiconductor manufacturer, its calculator systems were non straight attacked yesteryear whatsoever hacker, but instead, were exposed to the malware "when a supplier installed tainted software without a virus scan" to TSMC's network.
The virus as well as thence apace spread to to a greater extent than than 10,000 machines inwards about of the company's well-nigh advanced facilities, including Tainan, Hsinchu, as well as Taichung—home to about of the cutting-edge fabrication plants that hit semiconductors for Apple.
Although unnamed inwards its official statement, TSMC reportedly blamed a variant of the 2017 WannaCry ransomware assail for the infection.
"We are surprised as well as shocked," TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said, "We accept installed tens of thousands of tools before, as well as this is the rootage fourth dimension this happened."
Claimed to live on developed as well as spread yesteryear North Korea, the WannaCry ransomware nigh downward hospitals, telecom providers, as well as many businesses worldwide, infecting hundreds of thousands of computers inwards over 150 countries inside merely 72 hours inwards May 2017.
The WannaCry victims included large names similar Boeing, Renault, Honda, FedEx as well as the UK's National Health Service.
The WannaCry worm was leveraging an NSA's Windows SMB exploit, known every bit EternalBlue, leaked yesteryear the infamous hacking grouping Shadow Brokers inwards its Apr information dump, along amongst other Windows exploits.
TSMC assured its customers that no confidential information was stolen, as well as said the fellowship has resumed total operations at its facilities, but shipment delays are expected.
However, the chipmaker declined to utter over the implications for Apple, which is said to live on ramping upward production of iii novel iPhone models for this fall.
Besides beingness Apple's sole supplier of SoC components for iPhones as well as iPads, TSMC also manufactures processors as well as other silicon chips for many of the industry's biggest tech companies, including AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, as well as others.
