Lapsus$ data extortion group claim they have successfully breached the security of Nvidia’s internal network and stole valuable data. Nvidia has not made a statement about the incident yet but the threat actors claim to be in the network for one week.
1 TB of Nvidia data
According to Lapsus$ group statements, they have 1 TB data which includes “the most important stuff”, schematics, drivers, firmware, and more. The group has also shared the hashed passwords of all of the Nvidia employees while threatening to leak all the data about RTX GPUs and more.
Things went weird as the group also states that their VM in the Nvidia systems has been hacked back and encrypted by Nvidia. The hacker group admits it by stating that they have already backed up the 1 TB stolen data. The group also states that they are not related to any states or politics.
An interesting note in their message to Nvidia; the group claim to be selling “a full LHR v2”, which is not fully clear what they really mean. LHR is a limitation on new Nvidia GPUs that halves the mining capacity of the card. This measure was taken by the company to ensure that the gaming-focused products are bought by the gamers. This measure was taken to protect the gamers from GPU shortage but the group wants it to be removed for the sake of both miners and gamers.
“LHR hurts gamers”
In a later message by the group, the mystery of “selling full LHR v2” reveals; they are selling a solution to bypass the LHR limiting mechanism on GPUs, without flashing it. The actors have leaked 20 GB of data that is named integdev_gpu_drv.rar, claiming to include some sensitive data for the company.
Nvidia is one of the companies that really want to hide every single bit of information from the public. They are mostly staying away from open-source solutions for the sake of hiding their algorithms. It is actually somehow understandable from a company’s view. They are working hard to develop something like DLSS, and this technology is one of the selling points of RTX graphics cards.
The company has not officially announced the incident; currently, the only information Nvidia shared is “we are investigating”.