Friday, August 10th 2018
TSMC Details Impact of Computer Virus Incident
TSMC today provided an update on the Company's computer virus outbreak on the evening of August 3, which affected a number of computer systems and fab tools in Taiwan. The degree of infection varied by fab. TSMC contained the problem and found a solution, and as of 14:00 Taiwan time, about 80% of the company's impacted tools have been recovered, and the Company expects full recovery on August 6.
TSMC expects this incident to cause shipment delays and additional costs. We estimate the impact to third quarter revenue to be about three percent, and impact to gross margin to be about one percentage point. The Company is confident shipments delayed in third quarter will be recovered in the fourth quarter 2018, and maintains its forecast of high single -digit revenue growth for 2018 in U.S. dollars given on July 19, 2018. Most of TSMC's customers have been notified of this event, and the Company is working closely with customers on their wafer delivery schedule.
The details will be communicated with each customer individually over the next few days. This virus outbreak occurred due to missoperation during the software installation process for a new tool, which caused a virus to spread once the tool was connected to the Company's computer network. Data integrity and confidential information was not compromised.
TSMC has taken actions to close this security gap and further strengthen security measures.
Sources:
TSMC, via AnandTech
TSMC expects this incident to cause shipment delays and additional costs. We estimate the impact to third quarter revenue to be about three percent, and impact to gross margin to be about one percentage point. The Company is confident shipments delayed in third quarter will be recovered in the fourth quarter 2018, and maintains its forecast of high single -digit revenue growth for 2018 in U.S. dollars given on July 19, 2018. Most of TSMC's customers have been notified of this event, and the Company is working closely with customers on their wafer delivery schedule.
TSMC has taken actions to close this security gap and further strengthen security measures.
12 Comments on TSMC Details Impact of Computer Virus Incident
Doubles the tinfoil hat: maybe sabotage attempt form intel that can't get his 10nm for another 2 years.
Anyway, moral of the story? Update your embedded PCs from time to time if it's connected to local lan and not in a secluded vlan (I can't believe that their production line has been affected, they must have shitty network segmentation/security jesus, for an enterprise that has billions in revenue?!).
IT will be and always be an underrated department in an enterprise I guess :/
Two, the pricing and negotiations with clients such as Apple, AMD, Nvidia and so on are already complete and pricing is already set and not a subject to change regardless of the fab situation.
Hynix, Micron, Samsung... the memory developers are in a different situation. They don't sign contracts with other companies and make chips for them like TSMC, GF does, they make memory chips and sell them. This is where the difference is, TSMC can't renegotiate prices, memory manufacturers can manipulate them as they want.
What happened to having a sandbox fab to test and detect problems before being implemented across the board?