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NVIDIA is blackmailed into releasing its graphics drivers
A few days ago, the NVIDIA GPU developer company was the victim of a hack in which confidential company information was stolen. This action was performed by a group of hackers which calls itself Lapsus$.
These cybercriminals seized important information to blackmail the company. However, the most curious thing about this story is that they have not asked for money in exchange for not revealing the secrets. This group has asked NVIDIA to release its graphics drivers to the public.
How did the hack happen?
The group of hackers used a vulnerability in the company's system to get inside. These people managed to sneak ransomware into the system and managed to obtain a good amount of valuable information.
Among some of the data stolen by hackers are employee access credentials, information related to DLSS technology or the architecture used by the company.
In total, the hackers claim to have stolen about 20GB worth of important data. It is not known exactly how much data has actually been stolen and whether it will be used by the company to access its demands.
Some unusual demands
The most remarkable of all is that, against all odds, the group of hackers has not asked for money. In general, when a hack of this type occurs, the most common is that money is requested in exchange for not leaking the information.
However, this is not the goal of hackers, since they are not looking for an economic benefit, but rather a collective benefit. As has been known, what these people want is for the company to release the graphics drivers.
That is, its main goal is for the company to make GeForce graphics card drivers open source. Obviously, doing so would mean that the company loses that control it has over its software.
The goal of hackers would be to optimize cryptocurrency mining
Surely you wonder what hackers gain from these actions and the answer is quite simple, a greater ease of mining. Let us remember that the most recent GPUs of the brand have a function called Lite Hash Rate (LHR).
This feature was released a few months ago and seeks to reduce mining power, thus preventing cards from being used in mining. Obviously, miners cannot use the newest and most powerful branded GPUs due to this limitation.
The goal behind this is for GPUs to reach their target audience, i.e. gamers, and not end up in the hands of miners. So, their goal is to make the drivers free in order to remove this restriction.
today is the deadline
The hackers have given March 4 as the deadline for the company to release the drivers. In the event that it does not agree to this request, they would release the information to the network.
As we already mentioned, it is not known if the information that the hackers have is so valuable that the company decides to give up the exclusivity of its controllers.
So far, the company has not said anything or released the drivers. On its official website, it has classified the attack as a security incident. In any case, the company is unlikely to agree to the cybercriminals ' request.
In any case, it only remains to wait to find out how it all ends and if the hackers end up getting away with it.
NVIDIA strengthens its security
Due to this incident that has occurred with the theft of information, the company has been in charge of shielding its systems to prevent this from happening again.
In fact, as they have announced on their website, they have hired an expert group in computer security that will be in charge of reinforcing security. Similarly, the company has said that it has informed the competent authorities of the events that occurred so that they can initiate investigations.
