[dullgiulio]

Nothing to do with Snowden revelations, but with RSA prime number generation. Because of a bug on the chip, primes were generated starting from numbers divisble by ten, which are way rarer than those divisble by two (pardon the extreme simplification.)

That's a hardware design error. The claim is that Gemalto failed to fullfil the contractual clauses about quickly informing the customer (the Estonian state) of the security breach, not the existance of the security breach itself.

[anemic]

Well, there was this revelation that NSA had the 'Gemalto network wide open'. After week long investigation Gemalto denied any breach, leading to situation where you could either believe NSA or Gemalto.

https://www.wired.com/2015/02/gemalto-confirms-hacked-insist...

[kodablah]

Seems related if they trusted an untrustworthy company to inform them.

[IndrekR]

I believe it is not a design error. It rahter sounds like an incorrectly implemented manufacturing optimisation. And in that sense close to the Volkswagen diesel-test optimisation -- compromising the reason for the RNG/exhaust test in the first place.