Seoul High Court upheld an 18-month prison sentence in August 2026 for a former SK Hynix employee over the 2022 leak of classified CMOS image sensor technology and other trade secrets while he worked at the chipmaker's China office. The court found he breached internal security rules by printing and photographing confidential materials from the company's internal server and using some of them in a job application; the latest account describes the recipient as an undisclosed Chinese firm, while earlier reporting identified Chinese companies including Huawei unit HiSilicon. South Korea treats CMOS image sensor technology as protected industrial technology, giving the case national-security weight. The appellate court left intact a lower-court ruling that convicted him on trade secret leakage, acquitted a separate hybrid bonding allegation, and kept the term unchanged because he admitted the charges and most of the material was recovered. The case adds to a broader South Korean crackdown after another former SK Hynix employee's sentence in a Huawei-linked document theft case was raised to five years on appeal.