NVIDIA has confirmed the cyber attack which came to light last weekend. The assailants accessed the company’s private information, its employees’ login passwords to the IT network, and other sensitive data that has not been disclosed. Yet. And it is that the last request of the group responsible for the attack is that the company open source your GeForce drivers.
NVIDIA has been under pressure since a group of hackers calling themselves LAPSUS$ managed to breach its computer network. In a statement to BleepingComputerthe company has confirmed «a cybersecurity incident that affected IT resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further strengthened our network, hired cybersecurity incident response experts, and reported the incident to authorities.«.
Given the information that it was ransomware and the blackmail that usually accompany this type of attack, the company says it has no confirmation, nor that the intrusion is related to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. «However, we are aware that cybercriminals obtained employee credentials and certain proprietary information from NVIDIA from our systems and began filtering it online«.
NVIDIA Blackmail: Code Release
Last weekend the Lapsus$ group, allegedly responsible for the cyberattack, began to show details about the incident and the stolen data online, leaking a 20 Gbyte document file with password hashes of company employees and other information. regarding DLSS technology and the architecture used.
The assailants claim to have up to 1 Tbyte of data and threaten to leak the information on the Internet. They also comment that “They are evaluating NVIDIA’s position”which would indicate that the green giant is “negotiating” to prevent future leaks. It is a big problem for the industry because if it is paid in some way, it ‘feeds the monster’ and finances – even without intending to – new attacks.
If money is usually demanded in a ransomware attack, here the demand goes elsewhere. And it is that Lapsus$ is demanding that NVIDIA free under open source and on all platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux) their GeForce drivers which are so far proprietary. These drivers are essential for the operation of your graphics cards, as you well know, although it is difficult to know if it is really what they are looking for or if it is a smoke screen to achieve the main objective of these attacks: dollars.
The group has set the March 4 as the deadline for NVIDIA to meet your demands. Otherwise they threaten to publish information on current and future graphics chip designs and information such as the RTX 3090 Ti and the next generation of the dedicated RTX 40 series. We’ll see.
