Over the past five days, NVIDIA has been attacked by the South American hacker group Lapsus $, which has released confidential details about the company’s cryptocurrency-limiting cryptocurrency mining speed limiter (LHR) GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards. The group said earlier that it would provide access to data on software and firmware that promote LHR. The group says that unless NVIDIA pays more than $ 1 million, they will sell the software bypass tool at the highest price. This was originally announced by the online technology news site PC Magazine.
Hackers are threatening NVIDIA with a $ 1 million ransom to allow the technology giant to bypass the Light Hash Rate limiter for Ethereum and fully open all of the company’s GPU drivers.
NVIDIA LHR reduces digging capabilities by as much as 50 percent. The new Lapsus $ bypass will remove the Ethereum digging performance limiter, allowing full use of graphics card technology to increase Ethereum yields. While this is great news for cryptocurrency users, the main reason for initiating the LHR was to reduce the company’s popularity of GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards in the cryptocurrency community, allowing more inventory to be sold to both gamers and enthusiasts. .
However, as GPU-based Ethereum production still dominates the current market, the company’s GeForce RTX 30 reserves remain stagnant. Some selected GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards continue to sell to double their original MSRP on eBay and others. This practice is even with the decline in GPU prices from last year.
There are many tools to help increase the hashrate by slightly bypassing the LHR of graphics cards for certain Ampere cards. The current ransom price of $ 1 million for the LHR bypass instrument seems to be minimal at the moment.
So, for its part, NVIDIA is unlikely to activate any measure to reassure the hacker group and pay the amount demanded to completely unlock the possibility of hashing their cards. NVIDIA has until Friday to respond or Lapsus $ will “release full silicon files, graphics and computer chipsets for all recent NVIDIA GPUs, including the RTX 3090 Ti and upcoming revisions.” With this methodology, Lapsus $ increased NVIDIA’s requirements by forcing the company to offer its drivers open source capability on any platform available now and in the future, similar to AMD’s current practice of transparency with their graphics drivers.
The current Proof of Stake also touches on the prestige of Ethereum’s graphics cards, caused by the upcoming transition to Ethereum 2.0, called “The Merge”, later this year. So the miners will have a limited window to recoup their $ 1 million to Lapsus $ given the stormy sea ahead of Ethereum.
Lapsus $ continues the group’s threats to NVIDIA, claiming that it is releasing the source code for NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which is part of their graphics technology. The group makes these ongoing claims from speculated 1TB data hacked by NVIDIA, covering undisclosed information covering upcoming Ada, Blackwell and Hopper graphics card technologies.
Nvidia said the company was “aware of a cybersecurity incident that affected IT resources, [and] we are aware that the threat has taken employee credentials and some of NVIDIA’s proprietary information from our systems and has begun to leak it online. Our team is working on analyzing this information. We do not expect any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident. “
We have less than 48 hours to see what will happen to NVIDIA and the hacker group Lapsus $.
Source: Tom’s Hardware