Why it matters: Earlier this week, someone released a program to supposedly help cryptominers get around mining limits Nvidia installed on its recent graphics cards. It sounded unsafe to begin with, but now it looks like the whole thing was a malware scam.
When Wccftech’s Hassan Mujtaba investigated the Nvidia RTX Light Hash Rate (LHR) BIOS v2 unlocker this week, it turned out to be filled with malware. Videocardz notes that the malware connects to a remote server. Not only that, the program’s Github page has now disappeared.
Last year, Nvidia started shipping its new Ampere graphics cards with an LHR, which caps their capacity to mine Ethereum, hopefully reducing their attractiveness to miners and easing up the supply for gamers.
Earlier this week, Github user “Sergey” advertised the unlocker as a tool to sidestep the LHR by modifying the BIOS—already something manufacturers don’t recommend doing. Not only that, but it supposedly only worked properly with a special driver, which users had to get from private servers.
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.
Video:https://t.co/iYi96jyRv0 https://t.co/VzoG9CqHaW
— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) February 23, 2022
It was advertised as compatible with any Ampere card, including the RTX 3000 series gaming GPUs and Nvidia’s RTX workstation cards. TomsHardware reports that the unlocker doesn’t uncap the hash rate but instead infects PowerShell.
Even if promises Nvidia’s LHR turned out too good to be true, LHR probably had a limited effect on the market, as GPU prices remained massively inflated throughout 2021. However, prices are starting to go down now, signaling a change in the winds for Ethereum mining.
