Life is often stranger than fiction, and the internet shows us this routinely. Late last week Nvidia, known for computer chips manufacturing, reportedly suffered a cyber-attack. Official sources refuse to confirm to what extent the breach is, only saying they are investigating a “security incident.” In fact, additional attempts to gain more information from the company have been met with silence.
However, what Nvidia isn’t willing to say, insider reports are all too happy to spill the beans. Please note before we proceed, that this information is unconfirmed, and could be just baseless rumors. Regardless, it is interesting.
The attack supposedly happened sometime on Friday. By Saturday, several online security groups had put a name to the breach: Lapsus$.
Lapsus$: hackers with strange motives
This isn’t the first incident linked to the South American ransomware hacker group. In January, Lapsus$ claims to have attacked Impresa, a popular media company in Portugal. During the attack on Impresa, the operations of its newspaper, Expresso, TV channel SIC and various other websites were temporarily unavailable. Lapsus$ took credit for the incident, posting a ransom note on the affected systems. And while there was a loss of revenue for the day the paper didn’t come out, thankfully there was no indication that any personal data was stolen.
This time, it seems Lapsus$ is after something more substantial. Insider information, and a message directly from the hackers claims it stole over 1TB of data from Nvidia. The information includes passwords, schematics, drivers and firmware, all necessary to Nvidia’s business. The hackers sent a ransom note, but at the time, wasn’t clear on why they had decided to go after the hardware mogul, only that they would release all of the information to the public.
And this is where things get weird. In another statement, Lapsus$ claims it is doing this to help out gamers and the mining community, by demanding Nvidia remove the lite hast rate (LHR) limitations in all GeForce 30 series firmware. The LHR limitation, the GPU’s mining capacity for cryptocurrency, and by extension NFTs, was put in place in May 2021. The hope was to discourage miners from using Nvidia products to mine. It was noted in January 2022, the limitation had failed for the most part.
So, the question remains as to why this hacker group is asking for the removal of something already proven to not work. Still, Lapsus$ did follow up on their threat, releasing about 20GB of information in torrent documents.
Nvidia hacks back!
Now, it appears Nvidia has flipped the script and hacked the hackers. Lapsus$ has claimed that in retaliation, the company hacked into their servers and encrypted the stolen data, making it impossible to share. And, to add to this bizarre saga, it is possible Lapsus$ doesn’t have the information in the first place. Again, Nvidia has circled the wagons and is not answering questions from media sources who have reached out to them.
Lapsus$ claims to have made a backup copy of the data. And they are apparently suffering from the shock that Nvidia hack them! Either way, we will continue to keep an eye on the situation as it evolves. This is also a good time to make sure your passwords and other information is as safe as possible.
