Cyber Security Briefing

NVIDIA's stock price plummets by $400 billion following Jensen Huang's admission of his affair. A security breach at Digicert allowed hackers to steal customer data. Mindfactory reports an attack on its online store system that is believed to have targeted banking information.

NVIDIA’s market value plummets by $400 billion following the revelation of Jensen Huang’s affair.

After NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on November 8 admitted to having had an affair with Alice Huang, an alleged Chinese spy, his company’s stock price has plummeted. NVIDIA itself launched an investigation following the CEO’s confession, but Huang remains in her position for the time being. China denies the espionage allegations.

According to media reports, Alice Huang is said to be responsible for shipments of NVIDIA chips to China with a total value of at least 7.5 billion USD. These included, among other things, chips whose export to China is prohibited under U.S. sanctions.

Alice Huang, her husband, and her sister are alleged to have set up a network of companies in China and Singapore for this purpose. One of the companies has been on NVIDIA’s list of preferred customers since 2023.

A misconfiguration at Digicert allowed data theft.

The certificate provider Digicert confirmed a data breach on November 6. An unauthorized actor accessed archived customer data. According to Digicert, personal data such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses were compromised. In some cases, identification cards, driver’s licenses, and invoices were also affected, provided customers had submitted them to Digicert.

According to Digicert, on February 4, 2025, an internal system for archiving customer data was migrated from a VPN-protected network segment to another availability zone. This migration inadvertently allowed external access to the system. The cause was a misconfiguration in the internal account management system, which allowed logins without the usual multi-factor authentication (MFA).

In June 2026, Digicert then noticed that someone had created an unassigned user account with access rights to the archived data. The company corrected the permissions. It wasn’t until October 19 of the same year that it discovered this account had already been used to retrieve a small portion of the archived customer data. Digicert did not specify how many customers were affected.

Data breach at Mindfactory: Hackers intercept customer data.

The hardware retailer Heise Mindfactory informed its customers on November 6 that it had been the victim of a cyberattack. The company has not yet disclosed when the attack took place.

At the time of the customer notification, Mindfactory could not rule out the possibility that the attackers had gained access to personal data. If they were successful, the attack would have affected mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Bank and credit card information—which the company believes was likely the actual target of the attack—remained unaffected, as payment service providers store this data, not the online store’s system.

As a precaution, the online retailer reset all customer passwords. Customers must set a new password, which will be protected using a more modern hashing method.

Sources