Cutting corners: Earlier this week, a program was making the rounds that supposedly helped crypto miners get around the limitations of Nvidia LHR graphics cards. It sounded unsafe to begin with, but now it looks like the whole thing was a malware scam.
When Wccftech investigated the Nvidia RTX Light Hash Rate (LHR) BIOS v2 unlocker this week, it turned out to be filled with malware. Videocardz later noted that the malware connects to a remote server and then Tom's Hardware reported that the unlocker doesn't uncap the hash rate, but instead infects PowerShell.
Nvidia started shipping new RTX 30 series Ampere graphics cards with LHR caps last year, which limited their capacity to mine Ethereum in the hopes of reducing their attractiveness to miners and easing up the supply for gamers -- the latter part never came to fruition.
Earlier this week, Github user "Sergey" advertised the unlocker as a tool to sidestep the LHR by modifying the graphics card BIOS, something all manufacturers frown upon for obvious reasons. On top of that, the unlocker only worked properly with a special driver, which users had to grab from private servers. Since the malware discovery, the program's Github page has disappeared.
Update: All links to the Github asset download page have been removed since this tool is apparently infused with malware and we ask everyone to avoid downloading or using it in any capacity.
— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) February 23, 2022
Video:https://t.co/iYi96jyRv0 https://t.co/VzoG9CqHaW
The program was advertised as compatible with any Ampere card, including RTX 30 series gaming GPUs and Nvidia RTX workstation cards. Promises of Nvidia LHR turned out too good to be true as GPU prices remained massively inflated throughout 2021. However, prices have started to decline this year, signaling a change in the winds for Ethereum mining.
Image credit: Diego3336
https://www.techspot.com/news/93560-gpu-hash-rate-unlocker-malware.html
