A virus infection on Friday last week disrupted the operations of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker. It was a reminder of Taiwan’s vulnerability and exposure to cyberattacks.
However, there is a silver lining: That heightened exposure means that the government and the private sector are finally waking up to the gravity of the situation, providing an opportunity for improvement.
After initial reports that the disruption might have been caused by a hacker attack, TSMC announced that it was due to a variant of the WannaCry ransomware infecting its internal systems through a USB device during the installation of new equipment.
Apparently, the proper protocols had not been followed and its computers lacked a security patch for the Windows 7 operating system.
Although the disruption was not caused by a sophisticated group of hackers or state actors looking to steal industrial secrets, it could have been.
TSMC’s facility in Taiwan is its most important research and development base, and holds crucial production data and nanotechnology blueprints.
Taiwan is particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. In addition to attacks by Chinese hackers, who use it as a testing ground to perfect their malware before unleashing it on the rest of the world, the nation’s wealth, fast Internet connectivity and lax cybersecurity awareness have made it easy picking for cybercriminals around the world.
Industrial espionage is only one part of the problem. Infection by malware as sleeper software with which hostile foreign governments can launch sophisticated cyberattacks at crucial points in potential conflicts is something the nation needs to be aware of.
Cyberspace is an emerging battlefield — in addition to land, sea, air and space — that will play an increasingly decisive role in warfare, according to NATO.
Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan recounted a story of how he a few years ago asked a cybersecurity expert at a hackers’ conference in Taipei about the “cyberwar” between Taiwan and China. He was surprised to be told there was none, because “it is only war if you fight back.”
The good news is that things seem to be changing, as President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration has made cybersecurity a focus.
In 2016, the Department of Cybersecurity was established under the Executive Yuan to replace the National Information and Communication Security Taskforce. The following year the Information and Electronic Warfare Command was established as a military branch.
The government in May passed the Information and Communication Security Management Act (資通安全管理法), requiring government agencies, as well as providers of critical infrastructure — energy, water, information technology and telecoms, transportation, financial services, emergency services, hospitals and science parks — to establish and maintain cybersecurity.
Integration of systems, protocols and policies should help streamline security and response to attacks.
The government has also included the National Strategy for Cybersecurity Development Program (2017-2020) in its “five plus two industrial innovation program,” while private enterprises are stepping up cybersecurity measures, perhaps in no small part due to the initial outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware.
Taiwanese expertise in the sector, and its experience with cyberattacks, means that private companies are increasingly developing products and services to deal with the threat. The finance and e-commerce sectors are prime targets, and they are now investing heavily in cybersecurity.
Taiwan’s vulnerability is being transformed into an opportunity.
However, as the TSMC incident has shown, the Achilles’ heel in this is human error. Technology and security protocols are only as useful as the people who use them.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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