Recently, a hacking group called LAPSUS$ has successively attacked NVIDIA and Samsung servers and stolen a large number of files that can be called "core secrets".
Source: Social Media
According to a message posted on social media by the website vx-underground, the hacking group said it stole tb of technical documents and employee information from NVIDIA and Samsung's servers.
According to the current leaked information, the incident may become the worst cybersecurity accident in the semiconductor industry to date.
NVIDIA currently has more than 1TB of stolen files, including graphics drivers and development files, future graphics planning, DLSS source code (including technology developed for customers Nintendo) and other blockbuster materials.
In addition, the hacking group also threatened to disclose all the complete chip designs, graphics technology, computing technology information, and business transaction secrets of NVIDIA GPUs in recent years if they did not open source the graphics card driver and unlock the mining restrictions of the RTX 30 series.
Figure: Netizen comments
On the Internet, netizens' evaluation of this is almost one-sided.
Most individual players are schadenfreude due to insufficient supply of graphics cards and serious price increases, and some people have begun to share and study the use of these source codes, and even more speculation is that Russian hackers retaliated against Nvidia's "supply cut".
But soon, the hacking group showed off its "fangs."
LAPSUS$ announced that it will sell the "most valuable" part of the LHR source code (to unlock the mining capacity of the graphics card) for at least $1 million, which means that the individual who obtains the code can theoretically lift NVIDIA's mining power limit on RTX-based graphics cards, and the consequence is to continue to push up mining demand and the market price of graphics cards.
Figure: AMD Intel may "learn" DLSS code
For chip design companies and even competitors, it may not be a good thing.
According to TechPowerUp, Nvidia's DLSS technology, which is unique in the gaming graphics market, may be "learned" by AMD and Intel.
But engineers who have studied NVIDIA's CUDA chip compatibility program said that it was a cool thing to develop similar technology in the past, but after the leak, whichever company launches a compatible solution will be infamous with "plagiarism".
Figure: Social media
Even more outrageously, in order to force NVIDIA to "comply", the hacking group subsequently released 71,000 employee emails and passwords, which were confirmed by NVIDIA employees and said they had been affected.
Compared to NVIDIA, it seems that Samsung is in a much better situation at the moment.
Judging from the information that has been released, the 200GB of data in the Samsung server stolen by LAPSUS$ mainly includes the authentication code of the Samsung device, the biometric unlocking algorithm, etc., and allegedly also includes Qualcomm's confidential source code.
Although the hacking group has not publicly "made an offer" for Samsung at present, given the huge shipments of Samsung and Qualcomm, once these security vulnerabilities are illegally exploited, the impact on individual users is catastrophic.