Called LAPSUS, this is a group of hackers (supposedly) from South America. Accordingly, LAPSUS stole about 1TB of data from Nvidia servers at the end of February. The team is currently offering ‘jailbreak’ software in the form of custom drivers to remove the ETH mining limitations that Nvidia has built into its high-end graphics cards. These are Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series cards.
“We are aware that some threat actors have taken employee credentials, as well as some proprietary Nvidia information, from our systems. They have begun to leak online,” the representative said. Nvidia said.
It is known that the hacker group tried to blackmail the world’s leading GPU manufacturer through the Telegram channel. LAPSUS also demanded that Nvidia remove the ETH mining limit from all RTX 3000 graphics card models, and turn the graphics card driver into an open source version. March 4 will be the deadline for Nvidia to make a decision, according to a statement by LAPSUS.
In 2021, Nvidia believes that transportation and logistics problems along with a shortage of components have caused the company’s graphics card supply to continuously fall into “shortage”. Various retailers have simultaneously increased the selling price of graphics cards, with the actual price being much higher than the listed selling price.
Worse still, the explosion of the cryptocurrency market has led to miners constantly buying huge amounts of GPUs, leaving gamers with money but not available to buy.
This forced Nvidia to apply measures to prevent cryptocurrency miners from ‘robbing’ users who are gamers. In February 2021, Nvidia began integrating the Ethereum mining limit feature on the RTX 3060, before continuing to implement the feature to other graphics card models. According to Nvidia, the graphics card models with limited ETH mining speed are called “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR).
However, “Dao is one meter tall, one meter high”, the above protection measure could not completely prevent the tricks of miners. Accordingly, a series of popular mining software such as T-Rex, NBMiner quickly released new updates, helping to increase the ETH mining speed of the RTX 30 LHR models by 70% compared to the speed before being hacked. ‘lock up’.