Red Teaming a Semiconductor and Integrated Device Manufacturer
The Challenge
Design IP is the company's most valuable asset, spread across engineering workstations, source repositories, and EDA environments that sit close to fab operations.
The board wanted to know whether a nation-state style adversary could reach that IP, and whether the physical and supplier controls would hold as well as the technical ones.
“The supplier path they used was one we had never modeled. Closing it, and seeing our team catch the replay, was worth the whole exercise.”
The Execution
Define
Objectives centered on design repositories and EDA infrastructure, with rules protecting fab systems and a trusted group aware of the operation.
Operate
The team gained access through a trusted supplier's VPN relationship and a tailgated site entry, then moved toward engineering systems over several weeks.
Debrief
A timeline compared every technique with detections and physical security logs, showing where the supplier path and lateral movement went unseen.
Harden
Purple team sessions produced new detections and tighter supplier access controls, then the techniques were replayed until each was caught.
The Outcome
Supplier access is now segmented and monitored, physical entry procedures were tightened, and the SOC detects the lateral movement techniques that previously went unnoticed.
Leadership received a plain-language risk picture that shaped the next year's security investment.