Lapsus$ group has recently announced that they have breached Nvidia systems and stole 1 TB of company data. After an investigation, Nvidia confirmed that the hackers of Lapsus$ have managed to get into their systems. Now Lapsus$ is trying to sell a new tool for bypassing the LHR feature from the GPUs.
What is LHR on GPUs?
LHR is the name of the measure that Nvidia took to ensure their GPUs are bought by gamers, Nvidia’s main target audience. There is currently an ongoing GPU shortage because two reasons: Supply chain issues caused by COVID and enormous GPU demand by crypto miners.
LHR makes the GPUs less profitable when used for cryptocurrency mining purposes
So, Nvidia decided to limit its GPUs mining performance for Ethereum by half in the firmware and named the mining-limited cards as LHR (Low Hash-Rate). This feature made the Nvidia GPUs less profitable for miners thus the demand fell a bit. However, it is still possible to bypass this feature with custom firmware; but it voids the cards’ guarantee.
Selling the bypassing tool for $1 million
Now, the Lapsus$ group wants to sell a tool to bypass the LHR feature without the need for custom firmware for $1 million. This is a big money indeed and it might not even be working. Additionally, the tool might arrive in a malicious state with added codes by the hacker group. Finally, Ethereum is currently transitioning away from its current state; will eliminate the necessity of GPU horsepower. This will make the additional 50% performance while mining completely useless.
Still, if someone decides to buy the tool and if it really works, and decides to distribute it to other miners as well, the situation for gamers regarding the GPU shortage might get worse in the short to medium term.