NVIDIA, anti-mining measures (and not only) in the hands of hackers? It seems so

In the past few hours we have informed you of the attack suffered (and confirmed) by NVIDIA. The company did not go beyond a formal declaration, leaving room for rumors, more or less solid, and leading to think that the matter is damn serious.

Yesterday the South American group Lapsus $ acknowledged the paternity of the attack, declaring that it was able to obtain 1 TB of data from the systems of NVIDIA, which – in an attempt to make the information inaccessible – would have launched a ransomware counterattack, in way to encrypt the stolen data failed only because the hackers had made a backup.

In the last few hours the rogues of Lapsus $ have returned to make themselves heard, threatening to spread what is needed to bypass the mining performance limiterinserted by the company on GeForce RTX 3000 LHR (Lite Hash Rate) video cards. In the Telegram chat, the group claims to be entered the systems of NVIDIA for about a week, taking possession of several systems.

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Firmware, drivers, schemes and much more would end up in their hands. The bad guys tell themselves waiting for a contact with NVIDIA (to negotiate a ransom), otherwise they will spread what is in their hands, including what is necessary to bypass the hash rate limiter should NVIDIA choose not to spontaneously release an update to restore full power to its GPUs with the calculations behind cryptocurrency mining like Ethereum and the like.

“If they remove the LHR limiter we will forget the HW folder – it’s a big folder, “the members of Lapsus $ point out. To prove they are not joking, the hackers distributed a portion of the stolen data and, who saw it, believe that it was NVIDIA’s internal data. Lapsus $ components are ready to sell software to bypass the anti-mining measures of GeForce GPUsbut not to share it for free.

“This is a customized version of drivers and firmware. We don’t think it’s a great idea to share, even if they work, firmware and drivers that could make video cards bricks (or, in geek jargon, brick them).

At the moment it is not known, should the “release” become public knowledge, if there will be further adverse effects for the availability and prices of video cards, also considering the ever closer passage of Ethereum to the Proof of Stake (PoS).