Apple iPhone Chip Supplier infected with Wannacry Ransomware attack

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd(TSMC) the chip supplier to Apple iPhone said on Monday that almost 10,000 of its systems were hit by Wannacry ransomware last week. However, the silicon wafer manufacture clarified in its statement that it has completely recovered from the cyber attack and no system data in the manufacturing base nor client information was compromised in the attack.

TSMC, a hardware supplier to Apple Inc said that the impact of the attack on its third-quarter revenue would be 2% and admitted that the malware attack could cause shipment delays for almost 6 weeks time.

According to a statement issued by TSMC CEO C.C. Wei, an operational error occurred when a newly infected fabrication(fab) tool was not taken offline during installation as a result of which the malware quickly spread to over 10,000 networked machines across factories operating in Taiwan.

Wei agreed that his manufacturing unit lacked the automation of detecting cyber threats in an advanced way. And this caused the Wannacry ransomware attack to take a big toll on the production units of the silicon wafers-most of which are supplied to Apple to make iPhones.

The CEO of TSMC said that his company hadn’t received any ransomware note from the hackers indicating that the ransomware spreaders might be technology exploring toddlers.

Apple has clarified in one its tweet that the latest Wannacry ransomware attack on TSMC will not impact the launch of the upcoming iPhone series scheduled for next month. As the upstream supply chain has manufactured the chipsets in abundance after the initial ramp up.

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Naveen Goud is a writer at Cybersecurity Insiders covering topics such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Startups, Cyber Attacks, Cloud Security and Mobile Security

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