Suddenly. In an interview with a Dutch television channel, ASML CEO Peter Wennink that Samsung was behind the act of industrial espionage in the company. More precisely, the head of a manufacturer of lithographic equipment for producing chips formulated what happened differently. He said ASML's "largest South Korean client" was involved in the theft. When asked by the journalist to confirm that it was Samsung, Wennink again repeated that it was the largest client from Korea.
Since ASML does not have many βbiggestβ clients in South Korea, it can be said with almost complete certainty that they tried to steal technological secrets from the company in the interests of Samsung. Let us recall that last week the Dutch publication Het Financieele Dagblad that technological secrets were stolen from the company and transferred to the Chinese authorities. ASML later denied information about the actions of the attackers in favor of the Chinese government. According to the company, it was industrial espionage committed by an international criminal group.
After an investigation by the company itself, it turned out that a group of ASML employees in the USA registered the XTAL company and were going to sell the stolen goods through its representative offices. Criminals stole software for working with photomasks. According to the source, Samsung was interested in this software. Moreover, Samsung allegedly owned a 30% stake in XTAL. Once again everything leads to Samsung, but this does not mean that the South Korean giant could have known about the criminal origin of the XTAL software. They could guess, but this does not mean knowing for sure.
All American ASML employees accused of theft were born in China, although some of them had American citizenship, which gave journalists reason to immediately accuse the Chinese authorities of involvement in espionage. In fact, it turned out differently, but the sediment, as they say, remained.
Source: 3dnews.ru