The recent NVIDIA cyberattack saw hackers make off with up to 1TB of data from the company. But in return for their theft, the attackers just made a rather weird demand that one might not expect from a ransomware attack.
SANTA CLARA, CA - MAY 10: A sign is posted in front of the Nvidia headquarters on May 10, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia Corporation will report first quarter earnings today after the closing bell.
According to ArsTechnica, the hacker group calling themselves LAPSU$ is demanding that NVIDIA allow their graphics cards to mine crypto faster. If not, they're threatening to release the company's source code which was purportedly part of the stolen data cache.
What they're really demanding that NVIDIA do is to remove the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) mining limiters on their RTX 3000 series. As such, this likely hints to the nature of the hackers themselves-they could be crypto miners themselves, or they could be sympathetic to the "plight" of the miners affected by stunted mining performance on the Ampere cards.
Here is the NVIDIA hackers' statement, written in broken English (which suggests it might not be their first language) and shared on a private Telegram group which has over 11.8K subscribers at the time of this writing:
"We decided to help mining and gaming community. We want nvidia to push an update for all 30 series firmware that remove every lhr limitations otherwise we will leak hw folder. If they remove the lhr we will forget about hw folder (it's a big folder). We both know lhr impact mining and gaming."
But this isn't even the only demand that the hackers made. In another post shared on the same Telegram group, LAPSU$ demanded that the company make all current and future graphics card drivers open source. If NVIDIA doesn't comply, the group threatens to release all of the silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files involving all recent GPUs (likely the RTX 2000 and RTX 3000 graphics cards).
The hackers say NVIDIA has until March 4th (Friday), to cater to their demands. However, there's no indication that the company has any desire to comply-or have even seen the hackers' ultimatum.
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Why Are The NVIDIA Hackers Making Such Demands?
As previously mentioned, the desire of the hackers to get NVIDIA's LHR restrictions removed could mean that they're crypto mining enthusiasts, or they are at least sympathetic to the community. But beyond that assumption, there's really nothing else concrete.
However, one of their statements included in the demands could warrant some explanation: that one where they say they "know how LHR impacts gaming" and not just mining. So, does it?
Here is a video comparing the gaming performance of the LHR and non-LHR versions of the RTX 3060 12GB, courtesy of the YouTube channel Testing Games:
As you can see in the video, all of the games tested performed absolutely identical on the two cards. There was never a performance difference, however small, between the LHR 3060 and the non-LHR 3060 in terms of gaming. So we can conclude that NVIDIA's LHR limiter DOES NOT affect the gaming performance of the cards at all.
Whoever these hackers may be, they're doing it so they can keep on using NVIDIA's graphics cards for crypto mining. There's no indication that they're also doing this for PC gamers.
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Written by RJ Pierce
