Cyber Attacks and the Semiconductor Industry
As technology continues to develop and advance, more and more cyber gangs are launching attacks. Most recently, cyber attacks have used these five ransomware variants: LockFile, AtomSilo, Rook, Night Sky, and Pandora for their cyber espionage. Which has left many in the tech sector wandering, “What if my semiconductor business is hit by ransomware?”
Cyber Attacks and the Semiconductor Industry
In 2022, eight different chip suppliers were hit with cyber attacks that caused global delays for semiconductor groups. As if the supply chain issues from COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine wasn’t debilitating enough, cyber espionage is on the rise well into 2023. So the world developers began to get more savvy with cyber espionage tools to help you combat a cyber attack. According to Newsweek,
“Sergii Kryvoblotskyi, the technological research and development lead at MacPaw, developed the SpyBuster Tool to analyze where apps you use might steal data. He developed the idea to help Ukrainians protect their computers and data from Russian law enforcement agencies. According to Kryvoblotskyi, As a Tech R&D team before the war, we did a lot of research. So I began to check which of them could contribute to the country’s informational security. One of these researches [studies] was about the technical implementation of network filtering on macOS. I’ve realized it could be well-applied to protecting computers from potentially dangerous apps and adapted to help users in our new reality. MacPaw then began to offer the SpyBuster Tool to all macOS users worldwide.”
Ransomware and Extortion in Technology
Even with the continued development of tools from MacPaw, cyber gangs are not stopping their ransomware and extortion in technology. The financial ramifications of the delay after such an attack can have some serious consequences for chip suppliers. Take for instance, MKS Instruments. On February 6, 2023, MKS filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to suspend operations within several facilities. The company has been projected to do $1 billion in sales this year, and are still seeing the effects of the ransomware attack well into the month of March.
MKS Instruments Attack
MKS customers include companies such as Intel, Samsung, ASML and TSMC to name a few. As a supplier to some of the world’s largest manufacturers, MKS took a massive hit in this latest cyber attack. Financial Times tells us, “MKS Instruments told investors and suppliers this week that it had yet to fully recover from a ‘ransomware event’, first identified on February 3, in an attack that has strained supply chains for the global chip industry. We’ve begun starting up the affected manufacturing and service operations,” MKS chief executive John Lee said in a call with analysts and investors on Tuesday. The company revealed that it could still take ‘weeks’ more to restore operations, and would cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost or delayed sales. Most ransomware victims are able to recover in about three weeks, according to industry estimates.”
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