PC Gamers Beware: The Nvida Hack, And What To Do About It
In the past, we've covered how the mess that is crypto mining harms your chances of getting new gaming hardware and destroys your chances of getting it at a reasonable price. Luckily, after over a year of seeing every graphics card they made getting immediately bought by farms where they'll be used to create more Ponzi money, Nvidia started introducing hash rate limiters on their new hardware. That measure prevents new cards from being so proficiently employed in the destruction of the environment, which is great. Unfortunately, though, A crypto bro hacker group named Lapsus$ didn't take the rejection too kindly and responded by hacking Nvidia, and things got ugly.
Now, we've seen cases of good hackers and hackers who merely seem to have been destined to become the enemies of specific companies, but before we could even begin to feel some sort of misplaced hope that these could be the good guys, Lapsus$ dropped their mask early by claiming that they meant to help both the mining and gaming communities – two things about as compatible as Snakes and delicious mice.
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The attack resulted in the acquisition of pivotal codes that allow malicious actors to send anyone all sorts of malware that will bypass their system's defenses. They could send you the "newest driver", or a remastered version of Linkin Park - Numb.exe as a direct response for, say, reading this, and your smarts would be your last line of defense because your Windows OS would open all the gates because it'll think it's good ol' Nvidia knocking on the door.
These codes are already being used in specific programs some shady person online might tempt you to install, and there's already a list of the known Trojan horses you should take a look at. If you care less about what's already known and more about what we're yet to uncover, there are ways of configuring your computer to get protected against all possible attacks. The actions required to perform are more complicated, though, so if you're reading about this for the first time, chances are you should talk to an IT technician about it.
Let's address the elephant in the room, shall we? Lapsus$ claim they have no connection to Russia or any other political group known for cyberattacks, and that seemingly spells less danger, but the codes are out there for anyone to use now, so let's be so careful about this that we won't even save pictures of horses on our computer, regardless of how beautiful and healthy they might seem to be.
Disclaimer: I just noticed that there might be millions of artists out there who make a living solely off of selling drawings of horses, so I just want to make it clear that I was joking. It's apps such as drivers that you should be worried about; horse pictures are fine. Just steer clear from horse NFTs.
Top Image: Ubisoft
