Attack on NVIDIA: Company tries to respond with ransomware but fails. 1 TB of data stolen?

As reported in the past few hours, NVIDIA been a victim of a attackcomputer scientist – whose nature and extent has not yet been indicated by the company – which, according to the reconstructions, would have created gods serious problems with its internal network in the past two days. While waiting for more official details to emerge, fairly solid clues are circulating on the net that allow us to reconstruct, at least in part, what happened and reveal who was guilty.

Well, according to Vx-underground, a site that collects malware and virus samples for research purposes, NVIDIA has fallen victim to an attack by a South American group called Lapsus $ (or LAPSU $ as reported in the tweet).

Lapsus $ bad guys would have been able to obtain 1 TB of data from NVIDIA internal systems, including employee passwords and NTLM hashes. The surprising thing is that NVIDIA would try to return “tit for tat”, in turn attacking the group to encrypt their systems using ransomware. NVIDIA aimed to make the stolen data unusable, but it seems that the hackers managed to save the loot with a backup (above a tweet with a Telegram chat in which Lapsus $ explains what happened).

It is rumored that the source code of the graphics drivers is among the stolen data, but the true extent of the attack is still unknown and there may be more. Even the “response” of NVIDIA suggests – among other things in a chat hackers say they are willing not to disclose information for an unspecified amount. We will continue to update you in case of news.