46,000 TSMC employee records offered on underground forums; company says data came from a cloud provider and its own systems show no breach

Someone on the DarkForums and BreachForums underground forums claims to hold 46,000 TSMC employee records totalling 6.9GB, asking 3 bitcoin and threatening to publish everything if unsold within a week ^[1]. TSMC said some current and former employees' information was placed on an external site without authorisation, there is no evidence its own systems were breached, the data matches a cloud service provider's system, it is unrelated to production or customer data, and it has been notifying affected people ^[1]. Current and former employees should follow company notices and accept the assistance TSMC said it is providing; any contact involving accounts, money or verification codes should be independently re-checked, and important accounts should use multi-factor authentication ^[1][2].

Some current and former TSMC employees; the seller claims 46,000 records with fields including name, title, date of birth, job title, nationality, national ID number, address and postcode ^[1].