Emails and passwords from Nvidia employees have already been “cracked and circulated within the hacking community.”
Last week the group calling themselves “Lapsu$” hacked Nvidia and demanded that Nvidia remove its cryptocurrency mining limiter (LHR) from its RTX 30-series video cards. They claimed to have access to Nvidia servers and managed to steal at least 1TB of data during its ransomware attack. They have since been increasing their demands via messenger portal telegram.
Nvidia failed to comply and the group disclosed the DLSS source code as well as information regarding six allegedly unannounced GPUs, they also leaked the personal information of more than 71,000 employees of Nvidia. The digital ransom note also demands that Nvidia make its RTX GPU drivers open-source, in addition to removing the 30-series mining restriction.
The Lapsu$ group demanded that Nvidia remove its contentious Lite Hash Rate (LHR) feature, which limits the ability of its RTX 30 series graphics cards to mine Ethereum. This feature was implemented in early-2021 in reaction to the crypto-mining community depleting its stock, making it impossible for gamers to obtain the new graphics cards.
Lapsu$ said on telegram:
“We want Nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every LHR limitations otherwise we will leak [the hardware] folder. If they remove the LHR we will forget about [the] folder… We both know LHR impact mining and gaming.”
The Lapsu$ group made their ransomware debut in December with an attack on Brazil’s Ministry of Health, which resulted in the theft of 50 terabytes of data, including information on residents’ vaccinations. Since then, the gang has targeted Impresa, a Portuguese media company, as well as Claro and Embratel, two South American telecommunications companies.
While Nvidia has already admitted that employee credentials were stolen in the attack, it has declined to clarify whether those affected have been alerted or whether password changes have been mandated for compromised accounts.
Despite the situation’s growing ramifications — and the hacking group’s impending deadline — Nvidia’s incident response page has remained unchanged since Tuesday.
The trend in cyberhacking appears to be growing, and the organizations targeted are adamant about not caving in to the hackers’ demands. It will be interesting to see what organizations do in the future to prevent such attacks and data breaches from within their networks.