A program that was meant to restore the Ethereum mining potential of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30- and RTX A-series graphics cards has instead been discovered to infect the host computers with Malware.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker was said to “modify the firmware of graphics cards to remove mining performance cap introduced by Nvidia to make its LHR (light hash rate) boards unattractive to miners.” While making these kind of changes to the graphics card BIOS can be considered a “half-legal” action, those who attempted to undertake this process were met with big issues.
Not only did this ‘LHRUnlocker Install.msi’ fail to do uncap the mining performance of these cards, but they also infected powershell.exe with malware.
As shared by Joe’s SandBox Cloud, these types of programs are known to perform some “suspicious activities” while they attempt to accomplish their goal that bypasses limitations set by the OS and drivers. However, it shouldn’t “check for available system drives, perform evasive loops to hinder dynamic analysis, use code obfuscation techniques, or cause abnormally high CPU usage,”
The damage caused by this program may not be critical at first, but it can lead to other attacks of an even greater magnitude.
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Programs like this one are meant to combat Nvidia’s measures to limit the ETH hash rate – how fast a GPU can process cryptocurrency – of the RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti. This move was also made to help “get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
