WORLDTECHTSMC says outside cloud vendor leaked staff data as hackers ask 3 BTC
Chipmaker TSMC has acknowledged a leak of employee records after a group offered them for sale, starting at 3 BTC. The company places the origin of the breach with an outside cloud provider rather than its own systems.
What the hackers claim to hold
The breach surfaced when the hackers said they had obtained roughly 46,000 staff records. To back the claim, they released a sample file named "tsmc.txt", which contains 499 records of 19 fields each, according to the report.
The fields visible in that sample cover personal identifiers, home and contact details, banking information, job titles and emergency contacts. The complete trove is put at 6.9 GB and spans both current and former employees.
Price and deadline set by sellers
The records were listed for sale on online forums, among them DarkForums and BreachForums. The opening price was 3 BTC, around $220,000 when the listing appeared.
The sellers warned that if no buyer emerged within a week, they would publish the full dataset openly.
TSMC's account and response
TSMC announced the incident on November 12, 2026. It stresses that none of its internal systems were penetrated and that production and customer data were not affected. The company traces the exposure to an external cloud service provider.
Affected individuals are being notified, and the firm is working with that vendor, law enforcement and outside cybersecurity specialists to contain the damage. TSMC is headquartered in Hsinchu Science Park.
Earlier extortion episode
This is not the first extortion attempt connected to the chipmaker. In mid-2023 the LockBit ransomware group went after a hardware supplier, with the pressure aimed at that supplier rather than at TSMC's operations, and the episode caused no significant operational harm.
Open questions
- Has the authenticity of the sample been verified independently of the hackers' own release?
- Will the full dataset be published if no buyer appears within the stated week?