Semiconductor developer and manufacturer Nvidia confirmed that its network was breached in a cyberattack last week. The data extortion group Lapsus$ took responsibility and claims it holds 1TB of proprietary data including employee passwords and hardware data.
Bleeping Computer reported on Monday that the Lapsus$ group released a data cache almost 20GB in size, by way of confirming the network breach. Nvidia on Tuesday confirmed it had detected a cybersecurity incident on February 23, had detected no ransomware deployment on its systems and had no evidence the hack was related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An insider told The Telegraph that the attack completely compromised Nvidia’s internal systems.
The Lapsus$ group wants Nvidia to remove a hardware limitation that makes it more difficult to use Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs to mine for cryptocurrency.
Lapsus$ has already published part of the leaked data, what the group claims is “source code and highly confidential/secret data” related to GPU drivers and Nvidia’s Falcon processor. The group is also selling some of Nvidia’s LHR or “lite hash rate” technology, the same technology used to reduce a GPU’s mining capacity.
Nvidia on Tuesday told Bleeping Computer, “we are aware that the threat actor took employee credentials and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online. Our team is working to analyze that information. We do not anticipate any disruption to our business or our ability to serve our customers as a result of the incident.”
"The NVIDIA attack is a textbook example of how attackers have extended their reach beyond companies' PII, PHI and financial information, to confidential product schematics and source code," says Neil Jones, cybersecurity evangelist at Egnyte.
