TSMC Fabs Offline, Hit by a Virus, Production Impacts Confirmed

[Bones]

Okay, who downloaded porn on the 7nm workstation?

Had to be testing it's ability to stream and download it at the same time to "Stress Test" the chips - Look for performance PI charts, graphs and other related BS to come, complete with comparisons vs other chips to the user's Pron experience with each.

 

[newtekie1]

...lol,,,, ya , its the excuse when there dragged in to court for price fixing use hacked as there get out of jail card and all's forgiven [ with a little profit sharing to the courts [

You realize it is perfectly legal to just say "we shut down some production because we wanted to", they don't need a reason at all. Western Digital literally just did it last week.

Lack of supply is not price fixing, and has nothing to do with price fixing, and isn't a valid defense to price fixing charges either. So if you think they are trying to use this as excuse for price fixing, sorry you're wrong.

 

[Axaion]

Well, at least its not a flood but it will have the same outcome for us

 

[Vayra86]

An excuse to delay 7nm?

If that's the case, all I can say is 'told you so'.

New process never arrives on schedule

 

[carex]

So they hurt their own stock price for... what? Sorry the fake news bandwagon needs to go home today, it is drunk.

Tbis is why patches and service packs ARE important.

what an ignorant .....

u have any idea how the share market works....searching for logic....take this
in the past 1-2 year amd, nvidia, intel all share jump nonsensically amd jumped 1000% nvidia 900% intel 75% .....what a win win for the market.....and people think bitcoin is the only scam

BOTTOM line : Just because of few ignorant fanboys who hate to accept the reality company always win and consumer loses at the end.

 

[Vayra86]

what an ignorant .....

u have any idea how the share market works....searching for logic....take this
in the past 1-2 year amd, nvidia, intel all share jump nonsensically amd jumped 1000% nvidia 900% intel 75% .....what a win win for the market.....and people think bitcoin is the only scam

BOTTOM line : Just because of few ignorant fanboys who hate to accept the reality company always win and consumer loses at the end.

Consumers don't ever lose unless they want to... without companies they lose because there simply isn't product to be had. Go ask the Soviets

 

[Prince Valiant]

So they hurt their own stock price for... what? Sorry the fake news bandwagon needs to go home today, it is drunk.

Tbis is why patches and service packs ARE important.

Keeping such machines away from the internet, directly or otherwise, would work too. Updating might not be an option for them.

 

[coonbro]

Consumers don't ever lose unless they want to... without companies they lose because there simply isn't product to be had. Go ask the Soviets

''Consumers don't ever lose unless they want to...''

I guess that can fall under a fool and his money are soon parted ? like the vid cards and the miners got the prices up as they are / were . I can do with out that new card if you know its a should be 400 buck card and its listed at 1000 + bucks . I don't need it that bad i'll run off the CPU graphics till prices get more to real ..lol.... or find something else better to do in the meantime

 

[FordGT90Concept]

This thread is so face palm. WannCry is a thing and, unless they're security experts on an isolated system, no one wants to be infected by it. Yes, TSMC deserves a slap on the wrist for leaving themselves vulnerable to attack even when there's stories all over the internet of other companies getting hit by it (especially manufacturing systems). No, this isn't good. TSMC's services are in high demand by many companies. This disruption is going to cause a backlog to form. That backlog can lead to shortages in supply which may cause prices to climb.

AFAIK, AMD was working on 12nm GPUs for production at TSMC. NVIDIA sources all of their GPUs from TSMC. TSMC also has other customers besides them. It's not TSMC's place to announce who is going to be affected by the problems. It could easily reach us consumers by way of market forces.

 

[StrayKAT]

Consumers don't ever lose unless they want to... without companies they lose because there simply isn't product to be had. Go ask the Soviets

Well, the worst thing about the Soviets wasn't necessarily "no companies", but one design for anything. lol. Even the damn toothbrushes. Once the central authority approved a design, there was absolutely no deviation or competition.. all toothbrushes had exactly this or that many thistles and were this or that length. Meanwhile, the West encouraged boundary pushing and new (and often better) products would rise to the top.

Don't mean to derail though. Glad I got my GPU purchases out of the way for awhile....regardless if the virus thing is true or not, I can safely ignore this crappy side of the industry.

 

[R-T-B]

what an ignorant ....

I'm not an ignorant. I'm a freelance security consultant who has seen issues like this and worse (equifax ring a bell?)

You on the other hand, are you not the same guy who believes in flat earth theories? I think that speaks volumes about who is the "ignorant" here.

look at how many times these guys been in court and accused of price fixing .

I don't recall a case against TSMC? You are thinking of the DRAM/NAND cartel cases.

And I promise you their stock is already tanking in relation to this news, which make no mistake, hurts the executives more than it could ever help.

 

[Prima.Vera]

These machines apparently run on unpatched Windows 7, probably because they're connected to a private network instead of the Internet.

Doesn't anyone have a problem with this statement??? I mean, how the fork you get a ransomware to a machine NOT connected to the Internets?? On a CD/DVD? Flash disk? Floppy disk?? Even if that's the case, the USB ports are mostly used to update the firmware, add new config specs, etc, they don't run any executables or HTML files on them... Or do they???

 

[R-T-B]

Doesn't anyone have a problem with this statement??? I mean, how the fork you get a ransomware to a machine NOT connected to the Internets??

Employees.

Or do they???

Pretty aparent they do.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Someone introduced WannaCry to their network. Either it was via terminal that had internet access or via an infected USB drive. WannaCry does find Windows Network Shares and attempts to propagate itself through it. Any Windows machine connected to the private network becomes a target once one device on said network is infected.

Employees are the weakest link in any security system. It only takes one brief lapse of judgement to unleash something like WannaCry.

 

[flmatter]

It happens to local gov't too, MatSu Gov't

 

[Frick]

It happens to local gov't too, MatSu Gov't

And loads of hospitals in the US, and the San Fransisco municipal train company. The good viruses lay in wait for a long time to make sure the infection spreads as far as possible.

 

[Caring1]

My thoughts on this are that it was an inside job, or industrial espionage by a competitor.
Who has the most to gain by the downtime?

 

[warrior420]

I work in the semi-conductor industry... In the IT world, so I see this stuff. Competitors wouldn't do this, because competitors want other companies to florish too, because if they florish, the costs go down for them as well. If TSMC lost all business, orther businesses would have to pay up big money for R&D to pick up the slack. And companies hate paying for R&D...

Also, you'd be surprised how far back some OSes go for the machines that work on the tools. I remember running around trying to find a machine that could work with Windows NT because a tool was down and they needed an NT box to use their software that communicates with the tool. And these tools are 20 something years old... NT 4.0 is quite the upgrade as it is... These are machines that still make wafers and such. I work for a company that makes the tools that Companies like, TSMC and Samsung use to make their chips, and if they want a tool that runs on a certain OS, we aren't going to argue with them, lol. You try telling your customer that just signed a check for a billion to change OS's..... LOL, no one wants to be that guy here...