Nvidia's ransomware gang problem

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Since I cannot find it anywhere here yet: a ransomware gang named Lapsus$ from South America has infiltrated Nvidia a short while ago, it's known since beginning of Feb 2022. They were able to drag out a lot of Nvidia's internal files. As with such criminals, they have demands they want to get fulfilled, otherwise they'll leak stuff.

Strange thing is that their demands don't make much sense and are quite unusual. This ransomware gang claims to care about cryptominers. They demanded that Nvidia will remove the cryptomining throttling mechanism in their newest range of GPUs firmware updates, otherwise they'll leak stuff. They also told that though that they were able to work around that brake, rendering it useless. Question is: why do they care about removing that technic when they were already able to render it inactive?

Lapsus$ also reported that Nvidia fought back, and attacked the systems of the South American hacker group.

Lapsus$ has already leaked the whole source code of Nvidia's DLSS feature beginning of March.

Last Friday Lapsus$ threatened Nvidia again with this:

So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either:
–Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret
OR
–Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too!
YOU HAVE UNTIL FRIDAY, YOU DECIDE!

Nvidia officially stated that they will not comply with that demand. So really tough times for Nvidia right now, and well the ultimatum ends today.

Furthermore, some of that stolen data was already used to digitally sign malicious Nvidia drivers with malware embedded as officially being Nvidia's.

Hackers to NVIDIA: Remove mining cap or we leak hardware data

The Lapsus$ data extortion group has released what they claim to be data stolen from the Nvidia GPU designer. The cache is an archive that is almost 20GB large.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

US microchip powerhouse Nvidia hit by cyber attack

Exclusive: Parts of its business are 'completely compromised' at time of Russian cyberwarfare against Ukraine

www.telegraph.co.uk

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Making the drivers open source would make Linux users happy. They could finally quit depending on Nouveau.

 

[Free]

Making the drivers open source would make Linux users happy. They could finally quit depending on Nouveau.

Has Nvidia ever done something to make Linux users happy?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Lots of Linux users are actually quite happy with the nVidia proprietary drivers on Linux, they're better than nouveau or the ATI drivers. But open sourcing them so the purist distros could use them would be a step forward.

 

[Lexxi]

huh. I thought I saw this mentioned on here before. And the part where NVIDIA hacked back. Or, I should say, put ransomwear on the hackers system.

In screenshots from their Telegram channel, a LAPSU$ member claims NVIDIA put ransomware on their system after the hack.

NVIDIA says employee credentials, proprietary information stolen during cyberattack

The microchip company said it first became aware of the incident on February 23 and added that it impacted its IT resources.

www.zdnet.com

Supposedly the hackers have the information also stored elsewhere, somewhere the ransomwear could not get at.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Well now the ultimatum is over. So question is: did Nvidia comply, or not? And if not, what's going to be the next steps of the criminals?

Meanwhile Lapsus$ also hacked Samsung.

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

www.bloomberg.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This ultimatum was stupid. Releasing Nvidia's video card driver and DLSS source code was never the actually-serious threat that the hackers seemed to take it for.

In terms of the video driver - Nvidia gives it away for free, they don't make money on the driver and they won't lose money by virtue of the driver source code being exposed. They weren't going after Nouveau for providing an alternative for Linux, for instance, because they don't care. In fact it just means that Nvidia can more credibly insist that people from now on should definitely only download drivers directly from its official website because other sources are now untrustworthy even if they're providing a signed driver. And how often does Nvidia release new drivers? The "open-sourced" driver wouldbe out-of-date as of the next release, and the situation would return to the way it was pre-hack.

And as for DLSS, the only people who could possibly benefit from having that code in theory would be Nvidia's only tangible market competition, AMD. But in practice, they can't. For one thing AMD already has its own architecture and DLSS wouldn't be compatible with it, making the code useless; and for another, even if the source code is exposed and "open sourced", it's still proprietary and commercial rights and patents still apply, so AMD couldn't legally use the code even if it wanted to. Some third party taking the DLSS code and building a whole rival video card business from scratch with it isn't a realistic possibility either.

So yeah...kind of a nothingburger in the end. I'm sure Nvidia isn't happy about their drivers being stolen and would rather it hadn't happened, and the whole security thing is obviously a problem that has to be fixed if it hasn't been already; but Nvidia doesn't stand to be really damaged that much by this "leak". From the way I've been hearing the word "on the street", even the embarrassment of the company in the public perception for having been hacked has been mitigated a lot by them turning around and putting ransomware on the hackers' computers, which a lot of people find hilarious.

 

[Soen Eber]

I wonder what will happen when crypto currencies finally come up with a mining method that, as planned, won't involve the massive processing power now required. That processing ability is better used unfolding genomes or researching nanoparticle strategies.

 

[Essence Lumin]

That processing ability is better used unfolding genomes or researching nanoparticle strategies.

Or playing video games.

 

[Soen Eber]

Or playing video games.

Assuming the power requirements don't burn the house down, yes. The cards used for crypto are truly scary.