On Friday, British newspaper The Telegraph reported that the company had been facing two days of outages related to email systems and tools used by developers. “We are investigating an incident. Our business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted. 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,” an NVIDIA spokesperson said on Friday. The spokesperson did not respond to follow up questions about the scope of the attack and whether it was a ransomware incident. Reports emerged online that South American hacking group LAPSU$ has claimed it was behind the attack on NVIDIA. The group claimed to have 1 TB of data that included employee information. In screenshots from their Telegram channel, a LAPSU$ member claims NVIDIA put ransomware on their system after the hack. “Access to NVIDIA employee VPN requires the PC to be enrolled in MDM (Mobile Device Management). With this they were able to connect to a [virtual machine] we use. Yes they successfully encrypted the data,” the group claimed in a subsequent message. “However we have a backup and it’s safe from scum! We are not hacked by a competitors groups or any sorts.” Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow noted that the Telegram channel where these messages were posted is now “temporarily inaccessible.” “While hacking back is not common, it has certainly happened before,” Callow said. “Deploying ransomware on the attackers network may prevent them from leaking whatever data they exfiltrated.” The chipmaker was recently embroiled in controversy over its attempt to purchase Arm for $40 billion. The deal fell apart earlier this month, with both sides of the deal citing “significant regulatory challenges” as the reason why. NVIDIA is the biggest chipmaker in the US and reported a revenue of $7.64 billion in the last quarter.
