TSMC has confirmed that personal information belonging to some current and former employees was leaked, after local media reports that anonymous sellers on underground forums offered around 46,000 employee records for 3 Bitcoin.
TSMC confirms leak
The sellers reportedly threatened to publish the data if no buyer came forward within a week. TSMC said employee information had appeared on external websites but maintained there was no evidence its own systems had been breached. The company also said the incident did not affect customer information or production-related data.
TSMC linked the exposed records to a cloud service provider, although it did not identify the provider or explain what service it handled. Business Next reported that samples shared on the forums contained names, national ID numbers and bank account details.
TSMC said affected individuals had already been notified and that it was working with the service provider, cybersecurity firms and law enforcement to investigate where the leak originated.
Wider data security incidents
The incident comes as other Taiwanese businesses deal with similar problems. Travel booking platform EzTravel recently disclosed that data belonging to more than 690,000 customers had been exposed. Bank SinoPac reported that its online banking transaction system was exploited, resulting in unauthorized transfers totaling NT$41.76 million.
Similar incidents recently affected crypto exchanges and financial firms elsewhere. In October, Bithumb disclosed that an outsider had gained unauthorized access to one of its internal workplace tools, which may have exposed some customer information.
Daishin Securities reported that information belonging to more than 38,000 customers, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, had been leaked. Mirae Asset Global Investment was also affected, prompting South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service to investigate all three cases and send an on-site team to Daishin Securities.
The issue has also reached major US crypto firms. A security incident at Coinbase’s third-party analytics provider Amplitude exposed some customer contact information.
