Security News
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has tied her controversial visit to Taiwan to an alleged barrage of China-directed cyber-attacks against the territory. The column details many Chinese acts that Pelosi alleges Taiwan has had to defend - including some in cyberspace, where she accused China of "Launching scores of attacks on Taiwan government agencies each day."
Trouble is brewing over moves by Taiwan to prevent China from gaining access to its chip technology, as the island nation proposes tougher laws to deter the leaking of trade secrets outside the country. China has reportedly hit back after Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang called this week for a speedier introduction of legislation designed to protect the local semiconductor industry from what it sees as Chinese industrial espionage.
Taiwan's Ministry of Justice has tasked its Investigation Bureau to conduct a series of raids around the island and hauled in 60 Chinese nationals suspected of lifting trade secrets or poaching talent from China-owned firms. "The Chinese Communist Party has made a large-scale detour to Taiwan through mainland enterprises and poached Taiwan high-tech industry talents with high salaries," explained the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice.
An advanced persistent threat group operating with objectives aligned with the Chinese government has been linked to an organized supply chain attack on Taiwan's financial sector. The second wave of attacks hit a peak between February 10 and 13, 2022, according to a new report published by Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft, which said the wide-ranging supply chain compromise specifically targeted the software systems of financial institutions, resulting in "Abnormal cases of placing orders."
Taiwan's Parliament, the Executive Yuan, yesterday revealed draft amendments to national security laws aimed at deterring and punishing Chinese economic espionage efforts directed at stealing tech industry secrets. Premier Su Tseng-chang said Taiwanese authorities have observed Chinese interests infiltrating local operations and "Utilizing various methods to lure high-tech talent from Taiwan and steal Taiwanese core technologies."
A top US Army War College paper suggests Taiwan should credibly threaten to eradicate, or eradicate, its semiconductor industry if threatened by China so that Beijing would no longer be interested in unification. The US Army War College showed the paper was its most popular of the year, when it revealed it topped a list of the most downloaded papers of 2021 from its quarterly academic journal Parameters.
Taiwanese PC maker Acer has not only admitted servers it operates in India and and Taiwan were compromised but that only those systems in India contained customer data. The miscreants who claimed to be behind the network breaches boasted they stole gigabytes of information from the servers, and suggested other Acer operations around the world are also vulnerable to information theft.
The restaurant chain reportedly said no U.S. customer data was exposed and the attack did not involve ransomware. McDonald's is the latest company to fall victim to a cyberattack exposing customer and other data in the U.S., Taiwan and China, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Fast food giant McDonald's on Friday said hackers breached their servers and accessed data from customers in Taiwan and South Korea. The announcement by the iconic US chain about "Recent unauthorized activity on our network" comes amid a wave of cyberattacks worldwide targeting everything from meatpacking plants to pipelines to public utilities, some of whom have had to pay ransoms to hackers.
Fime has extended its portfolio of biometric consultancy and testing services to its Taiwan laboratory. Now accredited by the FIDO Alliance Biometric Component Certification Program, Fime is supporting APAC device manufacturers, and biometric component and software providers, with local services.