The insane ultimatum of hackers at NVIDIA: make all your drivers open source

The hackers of the group Lapsus $ who attacked NVIDIA and published online some of the stolen information tries to “up the ante”, making a request that seems to be born from a 5-year-old boy with no nose for business.

In a post on Telegram (which you can see below), the hackers they gave NVIDIA an ultimatumexpiring on Friday, which we can summarize as follows: make your Windows, macOS, and Linux drivers open source or we will publish all your “innermost secrets”, including various technical files that may also be of interest to the competition (but which are likely to be encrypted and unusable without appropriate software).

The request, childish and ridiculous enough because NVIDIA will not bow to this blackmail in any way, appears to be the result of an ongoing negotiation between the parties, given that the hackers say they have evaluated “their position and that of NVIDIA”. The company has until Friday to answer yes or no, otherwise the files will be released.

Serious hackers would conduct the negotiation in a very different way, without making “dream book” claims that seem to have been born in a nerd’s bedroom. Of course, NVIDIA could further improve its open source policy, we don’t mind this, but from here to think that it does so under blackmail. Furthermore, even if hackers were to publish sensitive files, other companies would refrain from replicating the technologies contained in them “in detail”, in order to avoid legal problems in some time.

In short, maybe we’re wrong, but it seems to us that the bad guys at Lapsus $ like to joke (in the jargon “troll”) or, even more likely, they are keeping the focus on “chance” to make a name for themselves. What is not done for notoriety.