A hacking group from somewhere in Latin America, self-styled LAPSUS$, it seems that he does not agree with the decision to limit the mining capacity of his gaming graphics cards to half in his RTX 30. That is why, in order for their manufacturer to lift these restrictions, they have decided to hack NVIDIA in order to use the stolen data as blackmail.
Over the weekend, NVIDIA received a ransomware-type hacking attack on its servers from the professional hacker group LAPSUS$. Which states that he has had access to confidential material of the company. (brandxhuaraches) Among which are the drivers for the RTX 30 LHR to recover their usual mining capacity. As well as information such as drivers, schematic designs, firmware and even employee information.
What has been stolen in the NVIDIA hack?
According to the LAPSUS$ group in their Telegram group, they have managed to obtain a large amount of sensitive data and, therefore, private and confidential after hacking NVIDIA. They have communicated this in their Telegram group with the following message:
We have hacked NVIDIA, the hack is public and this is our announcement.
We were on NVIDIA servers for a week and have quickly scaled up to being admins on a bunch of systems. We have obtained 1TB of datathe most important: schematics, drivers, firmware, etc.. We are still waiting for NVIDIA to contact us. We are also selling a complete LHR V2 (GA102- GA104) which we hope will be retired by NVIDIA soon.
If NVIDIA does not contact us, we will take action. Take note that we are not endorsed by any state and we are not in politics. Anyway, NVIDIA has tried but failed.
At the moment we cannot know what exactly they have achieved, but their demands have been made clear in a message:
Hello.
We have decided to help the mining and gaming communities. We want NVIDIA to make an update in the firmware of the RTX 30 to remove all LHR limitations otherwise we will filter the hardware folder.
If they remove the LHR we will forget about the folder, it is a large one. We both know that the LHR impacts gaming and mining.
As you can see, the people of LAPSUS$ are really an extortion group and we have to say that claiming that lifting the restrictions benefits gaming is literally taking people for idiots.
Have they really followed through on their threat?
Well, if we stick to the following message, then this would seem to be the case, since they have supposedly released the first part of the information that they have stolen from NVIDIA
Today we will leak the first part of the NVIDIA data, which contains the source code and secret or sensitive data for various parts of NVIDIA GPU drivers, Falcon, LHR, and the like.
If their claims are true, we will soon see information from NVIDIA in this regard. In any case, we do not believe that the free software community will decide to use libraries and software from private companies, and it should be noted that everything could end in a simple bluff. In any case, this type of illegal practice and the fact that this extortion group via hacking is not accepted by the community and is a crime in the vast majority of countries in the world. In conclusion, we have to say that this is one more example of what cryptocurrency mining has brought to the PC world.
