Samsung Veteran Indicted for Transcribing 66 Pages of EUV Secrets

South Korean prosecutors indicted a former Samsung Electronics researcher on Oct. 26 for leaking extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process technology, a class of know-how the state designates as a national advanced strategic technology. The charge, filed by the Seoul Central District Prosecution Service, alleges a violation of the Industrial Technology Protection Act. The researcher, identified only as A, was charged without detention.

The indictment became public through the office of People Power Party lawmaker Joo Jin-woo on the 12th. It reconstructs a deliberate extraction plan that began three days before A resigned from Samsung Electronics in early September last year.

Who is the accused?

A spent roughly 20 years inside Samsung, ending as a principal researcher on the materials development team at the company's semiconductor research center. The role carried direct responsibility for EUV process research. In April last year, A signed a confidentiality agreement that covered the very technology at issue in the case.

The stolen material matters commercially. EUV process technology applies both to foundry operations and to next-generation memory chip manufacturing. Both lines sit at the center of Samsung's future business plans.

How did the leak work?

The indictment details a method designed to slip past Samsung's internal security monitoring. The sequence ran as follows:

• In late August last year, A attended a lecture at a Samsung training facility in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province.
• At that facility, A used a shared computer to send a link to EUV process documents to a personal email account.
• A did not remove any internal documents directly. Instead, the researcher secured an external access route to them.

This distinction is the mechanism of the case. Samsung's monitoring presumably watches for document transfers. A link sent from a shared training-facility computer created a path that survived the resignation and left the building without a single file attached.

What happened after A left Samsung?

A took a position at a university-industry cooperation foundation in South Korea. From a university laboratory, the researcher used the link to reopen the technical documents. Investigators found a precise working setup: A displayed the roughly 66-page material on one monitor while building a new file on a second monitor and transcribing the contents by hand. The copied material was then uploaded to an external cloud service.

So the documents never left Samsung's systems in their original form. What left was a fresh file, typed out elsewhere, containing the same information.

"Despite being bound by a duty of confidentiality regarding national advanced strategic technology, the defendant leaked that technology," the investigation team wrote in the indictment.

What does this change for Samsung?

The case exposes a gap between document controls and access controls. Samsung could not stop a link-based access path created on a shared machine inside its own training facility. For a company whose EUV processes underpin both its foundry roadmap and its memory plans, the incident shows that confidentiality agreements and monitoring software did not hold against a 20-year veteran who knew the systems. The charge under the Industrial Technology Protection Act, rather than ordinary trade-secret law, signals that Seoul treats the leak as a matter of national strategic technology, not just corporate loss. The case will now move through the courts on that basis.