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Nvidia Hit by Major Cyberattack
- amelius 5y agoRussians?
- etiam 5y agoWell, it has potential for a singularly unpleasant watering hole attack, few states have a blindingly obvious track record of it, and exactly one of those is in the acute phase of open acts of aggression warfare... Seems pretty clear what's the highest priority working hypothesis until the evidence is in. Number two could well be entertaining ideas about shaving a couple of items off their conquest list while the action is keeping the World busy though, and if so both trojanizing a particularly poorly defended part of billions of computing devices worldwide and securing fuller access to software and plans for "AI accelerators" would seem desirable.
- ganzuul 5y agoOr all their talent made itself scarce when they saw the writing on the wall and what they have left is scriptkiddies who are capable of defacing a website when given a target to take down. It's bad to underestimate the enemy, but also bad to overestimate them.
- rmbyrro 5y agoCoincidence?
- DRAGONERO 5y agoThe article lacks a lot of information unfortunately, but it makes it sound like the website (distribution channel) was the only part they are concerned about, which wouldn't be classed as major. What I'd class as major would be some third party gaining access to NVIDIA's RTL designs and source code for their drivers for current and unreleased GPUs, but this hack doesn't sound remotely close to that. Luckily.
- ginko 5y agoEven if they get the RTL I'm not sure how useful those would be. While Russia does have semiconductor fabs, apparently their smallest node is around 65nm, completely useless for the large designs current NVidia GPUs use. At best they could have them made at a fab in mainland China, but even there the smallest node is only 14nm.
- tonmoy 5y agoA thief would be using the RTL to make a clone of NVIDIA graphics card, they’d be using the IP cores as modules in their own designs. With some minor adjustment it shouldn’t be too difficult to get at least most of the RTL working in a different mode (maybe lower clock speed)
- ginko 5y ago>maybe lower clock speed That is an understatement. 65nm is ten times larger than what NVidia is currently using. That means the area would be 100 times larger and any signal distances 10 times larger. And keep in mind that NVidia GPU designs already take up quite a bit of area on modern nodes. So you'd likely have to cut it down to a 100th of modules which would run at 10th speed.
- thfuran 5y agoIs signal propagation actually close to being a limiting factor in clock speeds for most designs? I thought it's pretty much always thermals.
- alangibson 5y agoMy guess is it's Linux user group trying to finally liberate the source code for their graphics card drivers. /humor
- prohobo 5y agoAh, the notorious Penguin Collective.
- fortyseven 5y agoDon't they publish books, too?
- annadane 5y ago"We'll send them AMD" "Ammunition of Mass Destruction?" "No..."
- annadane 5y agoThanks for the downvotes, appreciate it. I thought it was funny but apparently people have a stick up their ass
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- james-redwood 5y agoLiterally my first thought. Finally, no more graphics driver problems.
- doubtfuluser 5y agoPutting on my Paranoia hat: what if some aggressor indeed was able to introduce code into the Nvidia drivers, which - if put on enough systems - would cripple the ability to (re-)train Ai systems which might be used in military defense systems. What if - even worse - people decided to use Nvidia hardware in the inference systems as well… Putting down the paranoia hat. Happy weekend.
- ethbr0 5y ago> would cripple the ability to (re-)train Ai systems which might be used in military defense systems Not sure you're familiar with defense update and release schedules. As long as this gets fixed sometime in the next 5+ years, everything will be fine.
- Melio 5y agoThat's just a very very weird though. Sry but no one just hacks into Nvidias driver dev department and injects complex code to cripple ml training. It's just nothing someone can just do. And there is also nothing which will prevent Nvidia to debug the ml issue and revert the change.
- pjerem 5y agoAI aside, hacking into the driver’s build process to inject hidden backdoors into the drivers could be a realist attack.
- Melio 5y agoIs it realistic though? Hacking into Nvidias corp network, infiltrating their git server, disabling security scans and then injecting a backdoor undetected in complex code? In a process which is highly controlled due to it being a very central peace of software. Very unrealistic. It's easier to find or buy zero days in the wild for the same goal
- nimrody 5y agoWell.. that's exactly what happened to Solarwinds last year, didn't it? Actually smarter than that - they got into the build system and added the malicious code in the build process so you couldn't see it in the repository. Do you think it's that difficult for a state sponsored body to infiltrate into a commercial company?
- marcodiego 5y agoRooting for leaks of info/keys/specs that allow nouveau to legally evolve.
- zamalek 5y ago> Another major concern is that NVIDIA will now have to ensure that their services and the software they are providing to end-users is entirely free of any viruses or malicious code that could affect them. I don't know, things like this just show how great it is to put unknown code into your kernel.
- technonerd 5y agohttps://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1497484483494354946 https://twitter.com/vxunderground/status/1497484483494354946 LAPSU$ extortion group, a group operating out of South America, claim to have breached NVIDIA and exfiltrated over 1TB of proprietary data. LAPSU$ claims NVIDIA performed a hack back and states NVIDIA has successfully* ransomed their machines.