Foxconn, Apple’s largest manufacturing partner, has been back in the media spotlight over the last few weeks. Last month, the New York Times pointed to the company in its report on the poor working conditions in Chinese factories.
Foxconn has since been the target of activists and protestors, but now it’s found itself in the sights of a different breed. It seems that the world’s largest component manufacturer has been hacked by a new group called Swagg Security…
As 9to5Mac tells it, Swagg Security, or Swaggsec, infiltrated Foxconn’s corporate servers yesterday, stealing an enormous amount of classified information. The group of hackers uncovered email usernames and passwords, including that of CEO Terry Gou, and other Intranet login info.
But they didn’t just take the data, they uploaded it. A link to a torrent file on The Pirate Bay was posted to Swaggsec’s Twitter account yesterday along with this message:
“Users of Cyberspace,
So Foxconn thinks they got ’em some swagger because they work with the Big Boys from Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple? Fool, you don’t know what swagger is. They say you got your employees all worked up, committing suicide ‘n stuff. They say you hire chinese workers ’cause you think the taiwanese are elite. We got somethin’ served up good…real good. Your not gonna’ know what hit you by the time you finish this release. Your company gonna’ crumble, and you deserve it.”
The note goes on to discuss the Foxconn attack, which appears to be in response to the recent poor labor reports. Apparently the information Swaggsec stole, and published, contains enough data to log into Foxconn’s client system and place a manufacturing order. Wow.
Given the fact that Swaggsec’s Twitter account was created just a few days ago, we imagine this isn’t the last we’ve heard from them.
It’s just a shame there wasn’t any iPhone 5 information in the leaked data.