Dutch chipmaker Nexperia hacked by cyber criminals

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch-headquartered chipmaker Nexperia was victim of a hacking attack by cyber criminals last month, the Chinese-owned company said on Friday, and was investigating the incident with the help of outside specialists.

"Nexperia has become aware that an unauthorized third party accessed certain Nexperia IT servers in March 2024," the company said in a statement, confirming an earlier report by Dutch broadcaster RTL.

"We promptly took action and disconnected the affected systems from the Internet to contain the incident and implemented extensive mitigation."

Nexperia is the former Standard Products division of chipmaker NXP, spun off in 2016 and acquired by China’s Wingtech in 2018. It makes basic chips, transistors and diodes.

The company said it had started an investigation with the support of third-party experts to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It did not say if it had suffered any damage or losses as a result of the hack, but RTL said the cyber criminals had published dozens of confidential documents on the dark web in a demand for ransom. 

The criminals claimed to have stolen hundreds of gigabytes of confidential information, RTL said, including trade secrets, chip designs and data relating to customers including Apple, Huawei and SpaceX.

 (Reporting by Bart Meijer and Toby Sterling; Additional reporting by Inti Landauro; Editing by David Goodman and David Holmes)