The most talked about these days is undoubtedly the cyberattack that NVIDIA has suffered in what could be considered one of the most expensive thefts in technology in memory. And it is that after long days of silence and evaluations by those of Huang, NVIDIA finally releases a statement implying that it could be linked to the war that is happening between Ukraine and Russia.
Long days at NVIDIA, confidential leaks, and a lot of caution and silence, until today. And it is that according to what is known and not officially precisely, the attackers had a whole week to extract almost 1 TB of data without being detected, where they extracted drivers, firmware and certain technical drawings apart from the confidential information of certain patented technologies such as DLSS that It has been leaked this morning as we have anticipated.
The cyber attack on NVIDIA and Ukraine: a blow to the US?
We enter the field of speculation once again because there is a lot at stake here and therefore what better way to let NVIDIA talk about what happened:
“On February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident that impacted IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further strengthened our network, hired cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified authorities.
We have no evidence that it is being implemented ransomware in the NVIDIA environment or related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, we are aware that the current threat actor took employee credentials and certain NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and began leaking it online. Our team is working to analyze that information. We do not anticipate or see any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident.
Security is an ongoing process that we take very seriously at NVIDIA, and we invest daily in the protection and quality of our code and products.”
It would not be a controversial statement except for one sentence and the threats made.
Firmware release for two chips
Since it is a crime to link the relevant stolen files for download and to share them further, we are naturally not going to do it. But in the meantime, the attack seems to have aimed at something very specific: to remove the limitation of RTX GPUs for mining for the GA102 and GA104.
The attackers would have seized this information and the unlocked firmware of the LHR cards and call on NVIDIA to release them to the community. How much money is at stake to carry out an attack of this caliber? Apparently yes, and that NVIDIA names the current war between Ukraine and Russia could indicate that the blow is not against the company, it is against USA, EU and NATO.
The answer is complex, but plausible: Russia is economically suffocated and mining would be a short-term way out to take refuge in cryptocurrencies and modify their value if they have large structures of GPUs and ASICs. Bitcoin is more complicated to destabilize, but Ethereum… Given the fact that Russia is not going to ban cryptocurrency activity and mining but wants to charge for it, we could be talking about a very valuable asset that if NVIDIA is forced to release its cards the performance in Hash Rate at a global level would rise and with it the value of Ethereum giving Russia a safeguard against strangulation.
In return, the price of GPUs would rise again despite the fact that a few hours ago we commented that it is falling in this month of February by an average of 20%. Radical turn once again?
