“Foxconn, the gargantuan Chinese manufacturing backend for much of the tech industry, has developed a reputation as one of the world’s largest, least ethical, and most secretive companies,” Andy Greenberg writes for Forbes. “What better target for an unknown group of hackers trying to make a name for themselves?”
“On Wednesday evening, a hacker group calling itself Swagg Security claimed that it had penetrated Foxconn’s network and later posted a six megabyte file to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay that included a dump of employees’ usernames and passwords from the company along with passwords that allowed access to several of the Foxconn’s internal servers,” Greenberg reports. “Foxconn, which serves as Apple’s chief manufacturer but also works with Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Motoroloa, Cisco, Nokia, and practically any other tech firm that owns a hardware business, has come under scrutiny recently for alleged labor abuses that include unsafe conditions, inhumanly long hours, underage employees, and a spate of worker suicides. Chief executive Terry Gou hasn’t helped his company’s image with comments like one recent public statement that compared the company’s one million employees to animals in a zoo.”
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