A group of hackers who infiltrated Nvidia’s servers last month are trying to sell software that can unlock mining speed limiters on the company’s flagship graphics card.
A South American hacker group called LAPSUS claims to have stolen terabytes of data from Nvidia servers in late February. The group is now offering software in the form of a custom driver to remove the restrictions the company has placed on its advanced graphics cards.
Nvidia stated that they became aware of the incident on February 23rd, and reportedly stated on March 2nd:
“We are aware that an attacker took employee credentials and some Nvidia-related information from our systems and began transmitting it over the Internet.”
A group of cybercriminals is trying to blackmail a California company through their Telegram channel. In addition to leaking sensitive personal information it stole, the group is proposing to bypass restrictions on Nvidia RTX 3000 series graphics cards to enable faster hash rates for Ethereum mining.
On March 1, PCMag posted screenshots from the group’s channel stating, “This leak contains source code and top-secret/secret data from various parts of the Nvidia GPU driver, Falcon, LHR, etc.”
LHR stands for “Lite Hash Rate” and is the deciding factor the company introduced to modify its GPUs in 2021 to prevent cryptocurrency miners from picking them all, leaving some of them in their main market for PC gamers.
The group of hackers is also trying to solve Nvidia’s demands to remove the limiter from all RTX 3000 series cards and make the drivers open. This gave the company a March 4 deadline to make a decision.
Related: Nvidia Restricts Crypto Mining on RTX-3060 Gaming Graphics Cards Again
Graphics card prices and availability have been a nuisance for gamers over the past few years, heightening their concerns about crypto miners and the industry in general.
High-end GPUs can cost upwards of $1,800 if available, and lower-spec models are difficult to obtain, leading to a used-card market where older graphics cards often cost more than they originally cost. Regions.
