A hacking group from somewhere in Latin America, self-proclaimed LAPSUS$it seems that he does not agree with the decision to limit the mining capacity of his gaming graphics cards in his RTX 30 by half. That is why, in order for their manufacturer to lift these restrictions, they have decided to hack NVIDIA in order to use the stolen data as blackmail.
Over the weekend, NVIDIA received a ransomware hacking attack on its servers from the professional hacker group LAPSUS$. Which specifies that he had access to confidential elements of the company. Among which are the drivers allowing the RTX 30 LHR to recover its usual mining capacity. As well as information such as drivers, schematic designs, firmware, and even employee information.
What was stolen from NVIDIA’s hack?
According to the LAPSUS$ group in their Telegram group, they managed to obtain a large amount of sensitive and therefore private and confidential data after hacking NVIDIA, they communicated it 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 quickly moved on to become administrators on a bunch of systems. We have acquired 1 TB of dataMost 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 soon be retired by NVIDIA.
If NVIDIA does not contact us, we will take action. Please note that we are not endorsed by any state and we are not in politics. Anyway, NVIDIA tried but failed.
At this time, we cannot know exactly what they have accomplished, but their requests were clearly expressed in a message:
Salvation.
We decided to help the mining and gaming communities. We want NVIDIA to do an RTX 30 firmware update to remove all LHR limitations otherwise we will filter the hardware folder.
If they delete the LHR, we’ll forget about the file, it’s huge. We both know that LHR impacts gaming and mining.
As you can see, the folks at LAPSUS$ are truly an extortionist bunch and we have to say that claiming the lifting of restrictions benefits the game is literally fooling people.
Did they really follow up on their threat?
Well, if we stick to the following post, it seems to be because they supposedly released the first part of the information they stole from NVIDIA
Today we will be leaking the first part of NVIDIA data, which contains source code and secret or sensitive data for various parts of NVIDIA GPU drivers, Falcon, LHR, etc.
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 it could all 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.
