Nvidia Hacking Group Turn Their Attention to Samsung with 190GB Data Leak!

If you’ve been paying attention to the recent tech news, I’m fairly sure that most of you will be aware of the major hacking incident that occurred with Nvidia late last month. Put simply, and for those of you who need a quick catch up, a group known only as ‘Lapsus$’ successfully obtained what is believed to be around 1TB of highly sensitive data from the tech giant. – Worrying stuff for sure!

Following the latest report via Twitter user ‘@vxunderground‘ though, it would appear that ‘Lapsus$’ has temporarily turned its attention towards Samsung with a huge 190GB of data successfully stolen from the company having been posted online that is, basically, available for anyone to download right now!

Samsung Joins Nvidia in Huge Data Breach Leak!

Comparatively speaking, while it would appear that the Nvidia data breach has been far more significant, this information posted in relation to Samsung is still pretty big stuff. I’m not even saying it’s reported as the torrent is very much out in the wild and, from what I can ascertain, appeared to be 100% genuine. It even includes a handy dandy ‘read me’ to help people identify certain aspects of the information released.

In a nutshell, though, the biggest key points of this Samsung data breach include:

• Source code for various Samsung proprietry technologies/software
• Algorithms for biometric unlock operations
• Source code from Qualcomm (a major software provider for wireless/networking technology)

And as I hinted to above, I’m not even saying that this data is merely reportedly available. I’ve personally seen the torrent as available to download with hundreds of people confirming its validity in the comments. – Given how likely that people are going to attempt to hijack this with malware, however, you can perhaps appreciate why I’m not going to point you in any specific directions as to how to find it for yourself!

What Happens Now?

This new Samsung leak is a bit unusual. Largely because when ‘Lapsus$’ successfully stole data from Nvidia, the ‘return’ of it did come with a number of demands. Namely, the removal of LHR mining restrictions, and then, subsequently, the requirement for them to make all future driver releases open-source. Oh, and not to mention an apparent payment of $1M.

In regards to Samsung though, in so far as we can tell, no demand/s was made. If they were, neither Samsung nor ‘Lapsus$’ decided to make them public. – A good guess, therefore, may be that this Samsung data has possibly been posted simply as a form of disguised threat to Nvidia. Basically, ‘we’re willing to give all this away for nothing. Imagine what will happen to you if you don’t play ball…’.

With the apparent Nvidia ‘deadline’ having expired last Friday, however, and with no agreement seemingly having been made, so far there doesn’t appear to be any indications that any further data from the hacking group has been posted online. This would, therefore, either suggest that an agreement has been made, or ‘Lapsus$’, as noted above, has simply decided to give Nvidia a couple more days to think it over. With, incidentally, this new Samsung breach palpably hanging in the air.

As we have said many times covering this news though, we still doubt that Nvidia is going to pay ‘Lapsus$’ anything. Presuming they don’t, however, it will be interesting to see if they follow up on their threat to just dump the entire 1TB of information online.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!