Technology

Following the breach, NXP reportedly took measures to boost its network security. The company enhanced its monitoring systems and imposed stricter controls on data accessibility and transfer within the company.

This is the real damage. China is establishing a surveillance culture in the west. By threatening to hack our computers, they hacked our culture instead.

I work at a company that is doing more and more security controls and it's sad to see the culture of openness get chipped away little by little by this.

However, even though it confirmed the theft of its intellectual property, NXP says that the breach did not result in material damage — saying that the data stolen is complex enough that it can't be easily used to replicate designs. As such, the company didn't see the need to inform the general public, reports NRC.

Looks like China got to peak at the Dutch's homework. However, that isn't going to do much good if China doesn't know how the Dutch got to that solution. However, I have no doubt it is just a matter of time and resources.

Also, it is unclear if the information that was taken was helpful at all. I doubt they had full schematics of next gen chips lying around. It also sounds like there is another layer of security they feel hasn't been breached. Which is good for the most part because it means the information has knowledge layers that have to be understood first for the manufacturing process.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Chimera, a Chinese-linked hacker group, infiltrated the network of the Dutch semiconductor giant NXP and had access for over two years from late 2017 to the beginning of 2020, reports NRC.

During this period, the notorious hackers reportedly stole intellectual property, including chip designs — however, the full extent of the theft is yet to be disclosed.

The attack bears all of the hallmarks of the Chimera hacking group, including the use of its ChimeRAR hacker tool.

To break into NXP, the hackers initially used credentials from previous data leaks on platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook and then used brute force attacks to guess the passwords.

NXP is a major player in the global semiconductor market and has been particularly influential after it acquired Freescale (an American company) in 2015.

However, even though it confirmed the theft of its intellectual property, NXP says that the breach did not result in material damage — saying that the data stolen is complex enough that it can't be easily used to replicate designs.

The original article contains 413 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Stole - as in past tense