ZyXEL

Founded in Hsinchu in 1989. In the 1990s ZyXEL modems were prized by BBS users: they coped with bad phone lines and had fast proprietary modes before V.34 existed. The company later became a major supplier of the broadband modems ISPs hand out, plus firewalls for small businesses.

The firewalls earned it a different kind of reputation. In 2020 researchers found an account called zyfwp with a plaintext hardcoded password in the firmware. CVE-2023-28771 was picked up by Mirai variants within weeks, and was used that same year in a coordinated attack on Danish energy companies. The name is meant to be pronounced "zy-cell", which nobody ever does.