Have you tried turning it off, and on again?
Posted on 03/12/2022 2:28:49 PM PST by FarCenter
Hackers have stolen data from Nvidia, the world’s largest GPU maker, and are holding that data ransom. The as-yet unidentified “threat actors” may be helping the company’s competition in China, according to a research group in Washington D.C.
Last week, Nvidia lost proprietary information to a group of hackers. A cybercriminal gang called “Lapsus$” has leaked Nvidia passwords, schematics, drivers and firmware and is threatening to release more information unless its demands are met, according to press reports. Those demands include removing cryptocurrency mining limiters on its gaming cards and making its GPU drivers open source, according to ArsTechnica.
Nvidia says it learned of a cyberattack on Feb. 23, 2022. “Shortly after discovering the incident, we further hardened our network, engaged cybersecurity incident response experts, and notified law enforcement,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in an emailed response to EE Times.
“We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the Nvidia environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” Nvidia said. “The threat actor took employee credentials and some Nvidia proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online.”
...
The hack could help China’s AI and GPU rivals catch up with Nvidia, according to the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), in a report today. CSET is a policy research organization within Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Not much is known about the hackers, but people are sniffing around the usual suspects.
“These tools — which the hackers appear to have gained access to — could help Chinese AI and GPU firms catch up to their US competitors and design state-of-the-art chips of their own,” CSET said in a report today.
(Excerpt) Read more at eetimes.com ...
“You’d think companies with this sort of proprietary info would have 2-factor auth.”
Absolutely. There’s your password then there’s the sticky note with your username and password under the keyboard.
That’s in the mix too and nobody gives a damn about it.
I wouldn’t worry about an EMP.
It would require a ton of emps simultaneous to make a big impact.
Freep me for details if you want.
I know it is bad enough that if I owned a company with that kind of technology, I would have all research and technology on my computers air-gapped from the internet and no wireless capability.
Why was Nvidia so concerned about cryptocurrency that it block usage of its chips to mine bitcoin? I suspect it was government pressure.
When CPUs ran at 10 or 20 megahertz it wasnt too easy to do other things than the tasks at hand.
Ruuning at 5 giga hertz and how many dozens of tasks at the same time, its so easy to hide bad code and backdoors galore.
Nobody really knows what their machine is doing anymore.
Have you tried turning it off, and on again?
The biggest threat to NVIDIA’s dominance in GPU chip based neural network AI comes from two recent startups, Graphcore and Cerebras. Graphcore builds a Wafer-on-Wafer chip (WoW) that literally bonds two chip wafers together to dramatically reduce the distance between the power supply and GPUs. This eliminates the conductors that create impedance and heat on the chip and allows operation at ridiculously fast clock speeds (10-100x) over NVIDIA’s. Cerebras is even more amazing and has designed a Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) that is the size of a full wafer with 10s of trillions of transistors. This combined with a very sparse software matrix architecture allows them to build electronic neural nets with more connections than there are synapses in the human brain.
Both of these startups are US founded companies like NVIDIA but, unfortunately, they are both built exclusively by Taiwan Semiconductor in Taiwan. If the CCP can destroy NVIDIA’s market and take back Taiwan and its industries like TSM, they will own the hardware that will make Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) feasible in the future.
I saw a PDP-8 with 8K of memory accurately simulate a lunar landing by the LEM. I bet nobody could do that now.
I have to admit that I wish I had the source code to the driver for the NVIDIA Quadro K5100M in my laptop so I could make some improvements to it.
Taiwan Semi also recently announced that they intend to develop chip manufacturing technology to compete with Lam Research. Not good news for my #1 holding
I remember having a 64k machine Z80 running home automation circa late 80s. Had problems with 48k in it. Got another years worth of programming adding 4k. Then ran out and got another 4k.
Today is a disaster in efficiency.
Hate to say it but even air gapped systems suffer breaches. The systems and networks aren’t the problem. People are the problem.
The company I recently retired from sent most of their IT to Microsoft and Oracle which means India and Help Desk to India and Poland.
The problem is companies don’t have professionals in the IT departments and they dont want to pay for them. They have a lot of unskilled clerks. And let’s face it the companies that have customers private data are not punished criminally, when it leaks out because of their negligence or incompetence. And they are covered by arbitration agreements with their customers preventing them from being held civilly liable.
You want to to change things. Eliminate binding arbitration agreements in relationships where private data is being kept by the service provider. And make the civil punishments brutal monetarily.
Cost companies money and put CIO’s in prison for failure to reasonably secure their systems, data, and networks and things will change.
I have a friend who did a lot of technical recruiting for Dell and Mirosoft who said it was commonplace to have to remove dozens of candidates from their technical cattle call interviews because they would access telnet and have someone else from who knows where taking the technical part of the tests for them...
ping
“I work in cybersecurity. You have no idea how bad it really is.”
Same here. If people knew how vulnerable we really are they’d crap tin Twinkies.
L
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