American chip producer Microchip confirms that employee data was stolen during the cyberattack they suffered in August.
The incident happened on August 17, and Microchip disclosed it on August 20, declaring that some of their manufacturing facilities had been affected. The cyberattack influenced the company’s ability to meet orders and forced it to shut down and isolate some of the affected systems to contain the breach.
The company revealed more information about the breach in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, declaring that the attackers had stolen some employee data from its systems.
Microchip Technology continues to assess the scope and consequences of the cyberattack with outside cybersecurity consultants. Currently, there is no evidence that customer information was also stolen by the threat actors during the attack.
Microchip’s IT critical operations systems are now back online, and the company has been back to processing and shipping customers’ orders for over a week now.
While the investigation is continuing, the Company believes that the unauthorized party obtained information stored in certain Company IT systems, including, for example, employee contact information and some encrypted and hashed passwords. We have not identified any customer or supplier data that has been obtained by the unauthorized party.
Microchip Technology (Source)
Play Ransomware Claims the Attack
The cyberattack was claimed by the Play ransomware gang, which on August 29 added the American company to its data leak website on the dark web.
Microchip is aware of this and they addressed the situation, saying that they’re investigating the validity of the group’s claims with assistance from outside cybersecurity and forensics experts.
The Play ransomware gang stated that they had taken “private and personal confidential data, clients documents, budget, payroll, accounting, contracts, taxes, IDs, finance information,” among other things, from the infiltrated systems of Microchip Technology.
Part of the data has been leaked by the organization, who threatens to leak the rest of the stolen data if the company doesn’t react.
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Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.
