Unprecedented cyberattack takes Nvidia offline for two days
The culprit behind a recent cyberattack on U.S. chip-maker Nvidia is still at large. The breach took Nvidia's systems offline for two days.
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Nvidia announced that its network has been compromised, and the company is in the process of investigating a potential cybersecurity breach that took down the chipmaker’s systems over the last two days. The latest cybersecurity concern adds to Nvidia’s problems with chip shortages during the global pandemic, which have affected the entire semiconductor industry.
News of Nvidia’s compromised internal systems was initially reported by British publication The Telegraph, which noted that it was likely a cyberattack.
“We are investigating an incident,” Nvidia told the publication. “We don’t have any additional information to share at this time.”
According to the report, the company’s developer tools and email system were said to have suffered outages over the past two days, leading to speculation that Nvidia’s network may have suffered from a cyberattack. Other parts of Nvidia’s internal network may have been affected as well, with The Telegraph reporting that the company’s network was entirely compromised.
If accurate, this could mean that confidential and proprietary information may have been unlawfully accessed. Of concern is that a malicious attacker could have injected malware onto Nvidia’s systems. There is speculation that ransomware may have been installed on Nvidia’s servers, though this has not yet been confirmed by the company. It is also unclear at this point what, if any, data may have been improperly accessed or deleted from the company’s network.
The Telegraph did state that some email systems were up and running on Friday. Nvidia’s website and home page are currently up and running.
At this time, it’s unclear who initiated the cyberattack on Nvidia, but the report from The Telegraph speculates on the timing of the cyberattack, which lines up with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Ahead of the situation in Ukraine, the U.S. government had issued warnings to technology companies warning of potential cyberattacks, but there’s been no confirmation so far that this was a state-sponsored incident.
In addition to investigating the attack, VideoCardz reported that Nvidia now also has the daunting task of ensuring that its systems are clean and that malware doesn’t slip into software and products that are shipped to consumers, including the company’s graphics cards and chips for autonomous driving, servers, and supercomputers. It’s unclear how long Nvidia’s investigation will take and if law enforcement will ultimately step in.
Prior to the cyberattack, Nvidia was most recently in the news for abandoning its acquisition proposal for chipmaker ARM. Nvidia had initially proposed a $40 billion takeover of ARM from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, but the deal ultimately fell through due to regulatory concerns.
