NVIDIA May Have Been Hacked, But By Who And Why?
As you may have heard, NVIDIA is kind of a big deal these days. Like, "bigger than Facebook" big. Mean Green's expertise in providing machine learning accelerators for hyperscalers, the enterprise and high-performance computing markets (as well as GPUs for gamers of course) has brought them powerful profits. This fame and fortune, unfortunately, can also make them a big target for cyber-criminals.
According to British news outlet The Telegraph, NVIDIA has been hit by a cyber-attack that's got the GeForce guys' internal systems all jumbled up. The outlet reports that NVIDIA's e-mail systems and developer tools have been suffering outages after a "malicious network intrusion." The article quotes an insider as saying that the attack "completely compromised" the company's internal systems, but The Telegraph wasn't told who was at fault for the attack nor even what sort of attack it was, such as ransomware or data theft.
The Telegraph also quotes a cybersecurity expert from the University of Surrey, Alan Woodward, who notes that the system downtime may not actually have been a direct result of the hack, but rather an attempt to contain any potential damage. Despite being a hardware company, NVIDIA does ship a lot of software to a lot of people, and an attack like this could be intended to slip malicious code into NVIDIA's drivers or other software. Woodward says it's likely that NVIDIA is checking for just such a thing right now.
For its part, NVIDIA simply told The Telegraph (paywalled), "we are investigating an incident. We don't have any additional information to share at this time."
It's not surprising that the company doesn't want to get into the details if it was actually hacked, as it may still be triaging the situation, but the mind boggles with ideas of who could have hacked NVIDIA and what their aim could have been.
