NVIDIA has confirmed its was hit by a cyberattack this past weekend. Reports of the breach first appeared online during Monday and Tuesday. It seems the threat actors was at least partly focusing on holding the chip giant to ransom.
Since the attack, known ransomware group Lapsus has confirmed it was behind the breach. Furthermore, the group has now published NVIDIA’s DLSS source code.
Lapsus was inside NVIDIA’s servers for a whole week and as able to steal 1TB of data from the company. The group contacted NVIDIA, threatening to release the content if the company did not remover the mining performance limiting feature on the RTX-30 GPU.
If you’re unfamiliar with DLSS, it is a tool that allows games to run higher framerates while keeping processing power low.
It seems NVIDIA refused that demand and Lapsus kept to its threat. An anonymous tip to TechPowerUp shows a screenshot that appears to be files from NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.2 Assets along with C++ files and other content.
Response
NVIDIA has yet to say if the leak is genuine or how much of its technology is shown in detail within the files. There is a chance there is enough information of the company’s proprietary tech for someone to get DLSS running on an open source Linux distro. Of course, doing so would be in breach of patent law.
The only official word from NVIDIA is confirmation it is investigating the attack. That was from last week, so it I presume the investigation is still underway. Perhaps the company knows the leak is not important and refused Lapsus’ demands.
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