Hackers threaten to turn every Nvidia video card into a mining machine

Nvidia, conducted a powerful cyber-attack on the resources of the hacker group Lapsus$, but they hid the stolen archives of technical documentation in advance. We’re talking about about 1TB of data, containing everything – proprietary documents, drivers, SDKs, firmware, information about the Falcon’s secret microchip. But most importantly, there are LHR limiter circuits, the disabling of which will allow the latest Nvidia graphics cards to be used for all-out cryptocurrency mining.

It was the LHR (Lite Hash Rate) firmware that was the main target of the Lapsus$ attack on Nvidia. The situation is contradictory, because on the one hand hackers demand from the company itself to remove this limiter, but on the other hand they threaten to make public the data on how to bypass it. It is possible that they are bluffing and that it is actually much harder to disable the LHR than it appears, but at this point it is impossible to verify this.

Hackers will charge a fee for information on how to disable LHR on GPUs with GA102 and GA104 chips. And there is no doubt that they will get it, because if the information is true, it will allow to use all the enormous potential of video cards from RTX 3060 to RTX 3090 for mining (now it is limited on the hardware level by the manufacturer itself. The cost of mining modules will quickly recoup, so the demand for this product will increase and the prices of video cards will again burst upwards. This is a painful blow to Nvidia’s policy, so it is not surprising that they went to extreme measures in the fight against hackers.