The most talked about these days is undoubtedly the cyberattack that NVIDIA suffered in what could be considered one of the costliest tech thefts in memory. And it is that after long days of silence and assessments by those of Huang, NVIDIA finally releases a statement hinting that it could be related to the war that is taking place between Ukraine and Russia.
Long days at NVIDIA, confidential leaks, and a lot of caution and silence, until today. And it is that from 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, firmwares and certain drawings techniques apart from the confidential information of certain patented technologies like DLSS which was leaked this morning as we had expected.
Cyberattack on NVIDIA and Ukraine: a blow for the United States?
We are once again entering the realm of speculation as there is a lot at stake here and so what better way to let NVIDIA talk about what happened:
“On February 23, 2022, NVIDIA became aware of a cybersecurity incident that impacted computing resources. Shortly after discovering the incident, we further bolstered our network, hired cybersecurity incident response experts, and informed the authorities.
We have no evidence that it is implemented Ransomware in the NVIDIA environment or related to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. However, we are aware that the current threat actor has taken employee credentials and certain NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and started leaking it online. Our team is working on analyzing this 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 our products.”
It wouldn’t be a controversial statement except for one sentence and the threats made.
Firmware version for two chips
Since it is a crime to link the stolen relevant files to upload and share them further, we naturally won’t do that. But in the meantime, the attack seems to have targeted something very specific: removing the limitation of RTX GPUs for mining GA102 and GA104.
The attackers allegedly took this information and the unlocked firmware of the LHR cards and called on NVIDIA to release it 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, but against US, 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 change their value if they have large GPU and ASIC structures. Bitcoin is more complicated to destabilize, but Ethereum… Given that Russia is not going to ban cryptocurrency activity and mining but wants to charge for it, we could talk about a very valuable asset only if NVIDIA is obliged to release its cards the global Hash Rate performance would increase and with it the value of Ethereum giving Russia some choke protection.
On the other hand, the price of GPUs would go up despite the fact that a few hours ago we said that it is falling in February by 20% on average. Radical shift again?
