The hacker group LAPSUS$ has demanded a considerable $1 million USD from NVIDIA for the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) bypass which supposedly removes the Ethereum mining clamp on the RTX 30 series graphics cards. The exact Telegram message states:
In a nutshell, the hackers are demanding $1 million, and a percentage that’s some sort of fee for the software implementation of the bypass. As you can expect, the payment needs to be made through cryptocurrencies to hide the identity of the culprits.
This bypass allows the user to remove the LHR limit without flashing the GPU BIOS, probably requiring a simple driver or registry tweak. If NVIDIA doesn’t comply with the demands (which is what will happen), the hackers plan on releasing the entire source code which will allow developers to program BIOS firmware that removes the Ethereum hash limit. The culprits don’t plan on releasing pre-built BIOS images.
