Recently Taiwanese company TSMC announced that they discovered a computer virus on their systems that forced them to temporarily halt production of their chipsets. Not much was known about the virus, but in a new report from Bloomberg, the company has since come forward with additional details about it.
According to the report, it seems that the virus that affected their systems is a variant of the 2017 WannaCry ransomware. Apparently how the virus managed to make its way into the system of TSMC was when a supplier connected software that had been infected with the virus onto TSMC’s network.
This could have been easily avoided had they run a virus scan, which they did not do, which is how it got onto their network and spread its way across their system and facilities located in Tainan, Hsinchu, and Taichung. TSMC did not dive into any details about how big of an impact this virus might have had on their operations, but regardless the case, TSMC’s reputation has definitely taken a hit.
However many are also wondering how this will affect Apple as TSMC is said to be the sole supplier of chipsets for 2018’s iPhones. However some think that its impact would have been minimal. According to Nehal Chokshi, an analyst with Maxim Group, he thinks that this would have only resulted in production delays of days.
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