The LAPSUS$ hacker group claims to have infiltrated Nvidia servers and found out a working way to unlock RTX 3000 video cards for ether mining and are ready to sell the data.

At the end of February, 2022 Nvidia announced that it was investigating a cyber attack that affected part of the company’s online business. LAPSUS$ claimed responsibility for infiltrating the servers of the video card manufacturer, announcing that the group managed to steal more than 1 TB of data.

The other day, hackers made an offer in the group’s public chat to sell information to all interested buyers.

The hackers claim they have a custom driver capable of unlocking Nvidia’s LHR (Lite Hash Rate) hash rate limiter for the RTX 3000 series of GPUs.

Recall that at the peak of the popularity of mining, top-end Nvidia video cards were sold in wholesale quantities, which made them practically inaccessible to gamers. In the fight for this category of consumers, Nvidia installed a software “Ethereum hash rate limiter” for flagship models in early 2021. Nvidia has equipped the entire line of graphics cards of the latest generation Nvidia RTX 3000 with LHR technology. However, the miners interviewed by journalists said that the restrictions of the new firmware are quite easy to bypass.

A few days earlier, another hacker claimed to have a way to unlock the ether mining limiter on Nvidia graphics cards and published a beta version of the LHR Unlocker program on his GitHub page. However, an independent review showed that in its current state, the beta version of the LHR Unlocker program does not work and it is possible that this is a “regular Trojan for building a botnet.”