Image Credits: Coindesk
When programs are designed to make something operate the way it should, they can sometimes do more harm than good. Interestingly, the Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker, which was expected to restore the Ethereum mining capabilities of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30- and RTX A-series graphics cards, did just that. As found by our colleague Hassan Mujtaba, instead of correcting the capped mining performance, the program attacks the host machine with malware.
Ethereum mining fixes Nvidia GPU malware
A GitHub project claimed to be able to unlock the full Ethereum mining capability of newer Nvidia RTX graphics cards, however, it turned out to be malware. The originally appealing program, dubbed “Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker,” claimed to remove Nvidia’s “Lite Hash Rate” software, which was included in newer graphics cards to discourage crypto miners from buying gaming GPUs, according to Tom’s Hardware and PC Gamer.
Members of the mining community ChumpchangeXD and Y3TI reported less-than-pleasant results on a YouTube Livestream on the Red Panda Mining channel yesterday: the tool had various viruses.
Moreover, according to Tom’s Hardware, the utility doesn’t even achieve what it says it does, which is to remove the GPU’s hash rate restriction. Instead, it appears to infect your system and trigger a slew of other strange behaviors, including as excessive CPU utilization, looking for system discs, and other things that should — and did — raise red lights. The article directs visitors to Joe’s SandBox Cloud, a fantastic website that shows how the infected file spreads throughout a machine after being installed.
Whenever Nvidia began using Lite Hash Rate in graphics cards in mid-2021, there has been a tremendous demand (and a highly profitable secondary market) for older RTX devices without a hash rate restriction. It’s a tempting concept to have a mechanism that might reduce demand by eliminating the restriction from newer cards. Regrettably, now this comes underneath the “if it appears too good to be true, it probably is” category.
Although the application itself may not do immediate harm, it should be emphasized that it only works with modified Nvidia drivers, which might then be infected with something even more dangerous. In any event, connections to the Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker have been deleted from the original report.
