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The company has until Friday to comply, and if it doesn’t, the attackers threaten to dump 1TB of stolen Nvidia data.
Last week, Nvidia suffered a ransomware attack, and now, the outfit that hit the company is threatening to sell what they claim to be a driver that can remove Ethereum mining limitations on the company’s GPUs.
The group behind the attack is calling itself Lapsus$, and it allegedly managed to steal as much as 1TB of data during their invasion of Nvidia’s network last week. Now, they threaten to dump the data unless Nvidia doesn’t offer updates that will remove the mining limiter on its GPUs. The limiter, known as the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) was installed by the company on a series of its graphic cards.
The firm decided to set it in place due to an overwhelming demand by the crypto miners last year, which resulted in a major reduction of the supply, robbing gamers of the opportunity to obtain GPUs. While miners have certainly grown to be one of the biggest groups that buy the company’s graphics cards, Nvidia still sees gamers as its primary customers.
However, gamers were unable to reach the GPUs due to the miners, who massively purchased them in order to set up powerful mining rigs and get as much as they can out of Ethereum before it switches to Proof-of-Stake.
Nvidia released a statement in which it said that it does not anticipate any disruptions to its business, or even its ability to serve the customers. In other words, it does not expect the incident to affect its business in a significant way.
However, the attackers now requested that Nvidia commits to completely open-source their GPU drivers for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Furthermore, they demand that the company continues with this approach indefinitely. The company was given a deadline to meet their demands, and the hackers expect the firm’s response by Friday.