Hacker group threatens to release bypass of Nvidia's hash rate limiter
Nvidia was the victim of a ransomware attack a few days ago. The group that claims to be responsible for the attack says it had access to Nvidia servers for a week, gained admin access, and pulled at least 1TB of data (via Tom's hardware). The group has threatened to sell or release the data unless Nvidia contacts them and removes the mining performance limiter on their RTX 30-series GPUs.
Nvidia introduced its mining limiter (Nvidia RTX LHR) last year to restrict the hash rate of RTX 30-series cards whenever the drivers detected it was being used to mine Ethereum. It was meant to be a deterrent for crypto miners who were hoarding GPUs for mining operations, which in turn has contributed to the global graphics card shortage over the last two years.
The South-American based hacker group, Lapsus$, has taken credit for the recent attack and threatened to either sell or release a «hw folder» if Nvidia does not immediately remove the limiter from its RTX 30-series cards. The folder contains schematics, drivers, and other internal data, which Lapsus$ says it knows is very valuable to Nvidia.
Including «everything about falcon,» whatever that is.
Recent attempts have been made to find workarounds to the limiter, which have either unlocked just a percentage of a GPU's overall Ethereum mining performance, of have instead installed malware. But there is the suggestion the group is already selling some sort of bypass for version two of the hash rate limiting algorithm for GA102 — GA104 GPUs. Though that hasn't been confirmed as far as we can tell
According to Nvidia, the hack was initially described as 'relatively minor,' and explicitly said it had no connection to the war between Russia and Ukraine. The group also said itself,
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