Chips with everything | Financial Times

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: Chips with everything

[CHINESE AUDIO CLIP PLAYING] 

Chad Duffy
I’m based in Taipei, yeah, I’m based in Taipei. The security community here is really, you know, really deeply technical, is a really vibrant security community full of lots of just really talented software developers.

James Kynge
That’s Chad Duffy. He works in cyber security. And if you want someone to stop hacking into your company’s computer system, you might call him. He’s American. But these days, he works for a company in Taiwan. Why? Well, because Taiwan is home to one of the most important technology industries in the world today: semiconductors. The computer chips you find in every phone, laptop, car and even missile system. And when you make semiconductors, sometimes people try to hack you.

Chad Duffy
Job security-wise, it’s pretty amazing, really. It’s like attacking is definitely not going to stop.

James Kynge
Chad’s company CyCraft is used to seeing security breaches. But towards the end of 2019, they got a call from a Taiwanese chipmaker about something completely new.

Chad Duffy
Basically, they just saw, you know, some anonymous user behaviour, said, OK, you’ve discovered that like some of our files have been accessed and they came to us asking, hey, can you kind of put together this whole picture?

James Kynge
What Chad and CyCraft found was a hack bigger and more sophisticated than they’d ever seen before. The hackers had burrowed deep into the chipmaker’s computer systems, staying there for months undetected, giving them free rein to move around and hoover up a gold mine of sensitive chip designs and other industry secrets.

Chad Duffy
That’s what I think where it got really exciting was when we say, wait a second, this is a this is a really cool, you know, speaking from I mean, it’s not, it’s not cool that this happened, but I mean, it was really interesting from engineering perspective how they did it.

James Kynge
They dubbed the hack “Operation Skeleton Key”. And the closer they looked, the more they realised this was no teenage hacker in a basement somewhere.

Chad Duffy
Over seven significant…