According to a scoop report by Telegraph on February 26th, America’s biggest microchip company Nvidia has experienced a cyberattack that caused damages to its email system and developer tools for at least two days.
More surprisingly, on February 27th, a group named Lapsu$ claimed responsibility for this cyberattack and said they’d undergone retaliatory hacks from Nvidia, according to Twitter account @vxundergroun. The group said that luckily, they had a backup of their own data.
LAPSU$ extortion group, a group operating out of South America, claim to have breached NVIDIA and exfiltrated over 1TB of proprietary data.
— vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 26, 2022
LAPSU$ claims NVIDIA performed a hack back and states NVIDIA has successful ransomed their machines
Intel and photos courtesy of @S0ufi4n3 pic.twitter.com/fXcTNqgIpW
The cyberattack on Nvidia was “minor” and was not related to Russia’s ongoing military attacks on Ukraine or its consequences, according to Bloomberg, citing an insider.
Nvidia has not yet identified the culprit. Instead, they issued a statement on February 26th. Upon the “malicious network intrusion”, the company said, "We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don’t have any additional information to share at this time."
However, in the afternoon of February 26th, shortly after the Telegraph’s report, South America-based Lapsu$, said they initiated the cyberattacks and had stolen 1TB of data from Nvidia. To prove that, they released a set of hashes data about Nvidia employees’ passwords for internal networks. Also, they said if Nvidia does not pay, they will leak data about the RTX GPUS.
Nvidia hasn’t clarified any statement by Lapsu$ or the alleged attack the group has claimed to have undergone.
The Silicon Valley-based chipmaker is best known for graphics processing units, which power video games and advanced computer simulations. Their chips are also vital to AI data processing.