Nvidia: Hackers blackmail GPU manufacturer

The extent to which the maniacal hunt for cryptocurrencies has now reached is truly frightening in some cases. Now Nvidia has experienced firsthand that the greed for mining new Bitcoins and the like cannot be stopped. Finally, the popular graphics card manufacturer became a victim of a cyberattack. The hackers themselves want to use it to force Nvidia to remove the so-called mining brake.

GPUs as a modern source of money

For Nvidia, the super disaster has occurred. A hacker collective called Lapsus$ is forcing the company to comply with their demands. Otherwise, not only a publication of customer data is threatened. On top of that, the criminals want to release valuable company secrets to the public. But what do the hackers want to achieve with this? Their demand actually sounds quite simple. They want to get Nvidia to switch off the so-called mining brake. This is reflected in a limitation of the performance when mining cryptocurrencies. The hardware manufacturer already announced the corresponding brake in the summer of last year.

At that time, the company made it clear that it wants to introduce a corresponding throttling especially in the 3000 GPU model series. And this has a lot to offer. For example, only 50 percent of the original computing power can be used when mining Ethereum. The goal of the whole thing is obvious. Nvidia wants its in-house models to be used for what they were designed for: Gaming. However, since the hardware became more and more sought-after at so-called mining farms, there was a real bottleneck last year. As a result, only people who want to use an Nvidia graphics card for gaming current games should now reach for it.

Warning of data leak

If Nvidia does not comply with the hackers’ demands, they threaten to publish extensive company secrets. To make it clear that they are not bluffing, they have already made a first example. A first leak has already taken place. The data set, which is 20 GB in total, is said to contain employee passwords, for example. In total, the captured data is said to comprise almost 1 TB. So, this should only be a foretaste. If Nvidia does not revise the firmware of its graphics cards and deactivates the corresponding brake, this could have severe consequences for the manufacturer. That Nvidia is rightly afraid of publishing the data becomes clear when you consider what the loot is about.

In particular, the information about the “Falcon” security chip could have serious consequences if it fell into the wrong hands. This is used to encrypt Nvidia’s graphics cards. In addition, data sets on circuit diagrams, drivers and other important information are also said to be in the hands of the blackmailers. If you take a closer look, you have to ask yourself why the hackers are acting so aggressively in the first place. After all, they state to Nvidia that they can adjust the source code of the graphics card in such a way to disable the mining brake anyway. We are curious to see how the story will continue and whether Nvidia will give the hackers small change.