• Hackers listed personal data of about 46,000 TSMC employees for 3 BTC, roughly NT$7.4 million.

• The dataset, claimed at about 6.9GB, appeared on DarkForums and BreachForums with a one-week auction.

• A sample file named tsmc.txt contained 499 records with 19 fields each.

Auction Opens at 3 BTC

Sellers on the underground forums DarkForums and BreachForums have put the personal data of about 46,000 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) employees up for auction, naming a starting price of 3 BTC, roughly NT$7.4 million or $220,000. The seller claims to hold around 6.9GB of records covering both current and former staff of the contract chipmaker. Bidding runs for one week, and the seller has threatened to release the entire set for free if no buyer meets the price before the deadline. To show the haul is genuine, the seller published a sample file called “tsmc.txt” containing 499 records with 19 fields each. If the full set matches that sample, every entry carries close to twenty separate data points, enough for convincing impersonation attempts. The material on sale includes names, birth dates, job titles, nationalities, national ID numbers, home addresses, personal mobile numbers and email addresses. Bank account details in the set also expose a second layer of victims: employees' emergency contacts, listed with their names, phone numbers and addresses. That mix of identifiers is direct fodder for phishing and social engineering attacks against affected staff, and the apparent exposure of organizational charts adds a longer-term risk of talent poaching at the foundry. TSMC addressed the sale in a statement on Thursday, November 12, blaming the leak on an outside supplier. The incident lands amid a recent run of third-party data breaches and fund drains at Taiwanese companies, including the job bank 104, the e-commerce platform 91APP, SinoPac Bank and the travel site eztravel.

TSMC Points to a Cloud Vendor

TSMC confirmed on Thursday, November 12 that information on some current and former employees had appeared on external websites without authorization, while stating that it has found no evidence its own systems were compromised. An initial investigation found the leaked set corresponds with system service data held by one cloud service provider, pointing away from the company's production environment. The exposed data does not include chip production or customer information. The chipmaker is working with the unnamed vendor, outside cybersecurity firms and investigators to trace the root cause of the breach, and has begun notifying affected personnel and providing them with assistance. The company did not confirm how many people are involved. The foundry has been through a similar supply-chain incident before. In June 2023, the LockBit ransomware gang demanded $70 million after listing TSMC on its leak site. That breach also traced back to a third-party IT hardware supplier, Kinmax Technology, whose testing environment leaked server setup files. LockBit later cut its demand after apparently realizing it had not touched TSMC itself, and the chipmaker ended data exchange with Kinmax while saying customer information was never involved. Under Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act, a firm that contracts out data handling does not shed liability, and affected workers can claim NT$500 to NT$20,000 each, capped at NT$200 million per incident. The financial backdrop remains strong: TSMC reported NT$763.064 billion (US$22.89 billion) in third-quarter net profit, driven mainly by revenue from advanced nodes.

Shares of TSMC (TSM) stood at $397.62 at the time of writing, down 4.04% over the past 24 hours, within a 24-hour range of $396.73 to $417.50. COINOTAG's composite scoring rates $389.13 as the strongest support below the market at 86 out of 100, with the nearest resistance at $416.97 scored a full 100/100. The daily RSI reads 46.2 and the trend reading is sideways, so the stock was drifting within its range rather than breaking down as the disclosure circulated. A close under $389.13 would be the level that changes that picture.