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Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

arstechnica.com

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Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#251

Post by breakfastduck »

beojan wrote: post #154
chmod775 wrote: post #5

> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either: Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret OR Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too! Intere…

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#252

Post by jstanley »

modeless wrote: post #18
chmod775 wrote: post #5

> So, NVIDIA, the choice is yours! Either: Officially make current and all future drivers for all cards open source, while keeping the Verilog and chipset trade secrets... well, secret OR Not make the drivers open source, making us release the entire silicon chip files so that everyone not only knows your driver's secrets, but also your most closely-guarded trade secrets for graphics and computer chipsets too! Intere…

No single piece of software has wasted more of my time than Nvidia's drivers, mostly (though not exclusively) on Linux. They've rendered my OS unbootable so many times over the years. So many times I've spent whole days of my life troubleshooting, upgrading, downgrading, configuring, rebooting. Then often reinstalling the OS after their installers mess stuff up in ways that are impossible to even know until they pop…

Why don't you just not buy Nvidia hardware?

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#253

Post by jeroenhd »

GreenWatermelon wrote: post #142
ezoe wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful what you wish for. While I agree the current cryptocurrency is a mess, but prohibiting a pure computation cause more harms than good.

The computations are ok, but exchange with, well, non-crypto currency could be prohibited. Crypto would lose its worth of you can't convert it to dollars in a feasible way. Much of the market is driven by speculative investment and get-rich-quick type of schemes. Of course, criminal organizations could still use it, but I believe it would be harder to launder money using crypto if banks no longer supported it.

I think a ban on buying and selling crypto might just be good for the cryptocoin ecosystem. The whole idea of cryptocurrency idealists is that it replaces cash transactions, so if there is any value in the system besides pure speculation, the crypto coins should still work as advertised. Services can still accept the coin and goods can be sold for the coin, but you can't launder money through crypto networks anymore.

It's crazy how banks are willing to scrutinise anything related to sex work to an extreme extent yet seem perfectly willing to support the latest weekly pump and dump by letting people exchange money for cryptocurrency at random exchanges.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#254

Post by Neil44 »

tyrfing wrote: post #84

Absolutely insane breach overall, hackers got everything (including unreleased products) and the only potentially mitigating factor is the verilog files for their chips MIGHT be encrypted. If not, it's nothing short of catastrophic.

I think Nvidia has to accept that all that stuff is no longer secret, and work from there. They would be nuts to comply with the demands and I'm sure Lapsus$ knows that but it's good publicity for them (Lapsus$).

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#255

Post by nextlevelwizard »

breakfastduck wrote: post #251
beojan wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.

Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value.

Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose.

More power to Nvidia. If I could make the decision the hashrate of any cryptomining on gaming cards would be 0. Let the crypto-bros buy the crypto cards and leave the gaming cards for people who are actually going to enjoy them.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#256

Post by schappim »

DangitBobby wrote: post #124
schappim wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I saw a good use for this week when journalists used it to purchase a car in war torn Ukraine.

Thats wonderful. Im sure a handful of victories can be listed. I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though. Anyway, I need not remind you of how big a boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists. I think it should be pretty clear to anyone on this site why someone would be against them, just like it's clear to me why someone would be for them.

> I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though

There was no cash. ATMs we’re dry.

> boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists

It is probably overstated.

Orders of magnitude more criminal activity would be going through cash and even orgs that are meant to KYC, such as Western Union or even iTunes gift certificates. How many grannies are sending crypto vs providing logins to their bank accounts?

I’m not a crypto-apologist, I just haven’t heard any solid arguments against it that can’t also be said about cash or the traditional banking system.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#257

Post by schappim »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #148
DangitBobby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats wonderful. Im sure a handful of victories can be listed. I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though. Anyway, I need not remind you of how big a boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists. I think it should be pretty clear to anyone on this site why someone would be against them, just like it's clear to me why someone would be for them.

I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though. Exactly this. I'm guessing if they needed food they'd be out of luck.

You’re probably not wrong.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#258

Post by jeroenhd »

ofrzeta wrote: post #58

I don't get that logic: "We decided to help mining and gaming community", while in reality removing that LHR feature would only help Ethereum miners.

There is something to be said here for individuals burning electricity to get back some of the extreme purchase cost of their GPU. It won't cover the entire difference between a normal listing price and what you actually pay for a GPU these days, but it helps a little.

If you're a gamer and you've bought a 3070 then you can earn back quite a bit of your spendings by brute forcing some crypto calculations when you're not gaming. It'll wear out the GPU a bit faster but all in all it's probably a decent deal.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#259

Post by fgdfg354321 »

charcircuit wrote: post #229
Godel_unicode wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*. * Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.

>It's impossible There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten. It's definitely possible to buy. Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.

> There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten

If you ignore the 90% to 200% mark up price from scalpers, sure.

> Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.

Ah yes, how to forget the mystic websites that have stock for more than 30 secs or the physical store that you don't need to line hours before and be in 10 telegram channels to know that.

Re: Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

#260

Post by schappim »

larsrc wrote: post #139
schappim wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would seem to be a rather misinformed comment even to a crypto-layperson. I’m surprised we don’t have a chorus of cyptofiles informing you that crypto emits less greenhouse gases than the traditional banking system, and there are coins/tokens that don’t require melting chips to establish proof of work. I can’t talk to the use of crypto currencies for crime, but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions…

A couple of million transactions per day: https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b... That's less than the number of private transactions in a moderately sized city, never mind business or financial transactions. Random comparison: NASDAQ alone sees 30-40 million transactions per day. http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar...

It’d be real interesting to do an analysis of the last mile power usage of the credit card networks / banking system. I wonder if the giant volume and ubiquity of credit card terminals tips the scales.
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