Chinese-owned semiconductor company Nexperia hit by ransomware attack

Nexperia, a Chinese-owned semiconductor company headquartered in the Netherlands, has announced being hacked after a ransomware group uploaded what it claimed were stolen confidential documents to a darknet extortion site.

In a statement late last week, the company said it had “become aware that an unauthorized third party accessed certain Nexperia IT servers in March 2024.”

The company said that the nature of the incident and the intentions of the hackers were not yet clear, and that it had brought in Fox-IT to determine the details.

“In the interest of the ongoing investigation, we cannot disclose further details at this point,” the company stated.

Nexperia’s announcement followed a ransomware group calling itself Dunghill Leak listing the company on its darknet site, making the semiconductor business the latest of roughly a dozen other victims dating back to April 2023.

The Nexperia listing on the Dunghill Leak site.

The extortion listing includes a range of stolen confidential documents as proof of the hack, including an employee’s passport photo as well as legal and technical documents.

The attack is the latest problem to befall Nexperia, which is a subsidiary of a Chinese partially state-owned enterprise called Wingtech Technology.

The company had previously battled the British government after acquiring the U.K.’s largest microprocessor factory, known as the Newport Wafer Fab, for £63 million ($76 million) amid the global semiconductor supply shortage.

The British government subsequently announced that it was ordering Nexperia to sell at least 86% of the acquired company. It argued that the acquisition posed a risk to national security relating to “technology and know-how that could result from a potential reintroduction of compound semiconductor activities at the Newport site, and the potential for those activities to undermine UK capabilities.”

Nexperia ultimately sold the Newport Wafer Fab last month to Vishay Intertechnology, a firm based in the United States, for $177 million.