There’s no such thing as a free lunch, which is why you should always be suspicious of any strip club with a buffet. By the same logic, when someone on the internet offers you a free way to bypass the hashrate limiter on Nvidia’s Low Hash Rate (LHR) GPUs – something Nvidia called “unhackable” – you should probably be a little sus. It’s almost certainly malware.
A tool released on GitHub, called ‘Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker’, claimed to completely bypass the limiter on Nvidia’s LHR cards. Well, that’s been found to contain multiple malicious viruses.
Tom’s Hardware and PC Gamer, among others, initially reported positively on what looked to be a promising tool for miners. They have since updated their articles to reflect the true, malware-delivering nature of the tool.
Mal with malware
But why would anyone find something called ‘Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker’ even vaguely tempting? If you haven’t been keeping up with GPU news over the last year and a bit, we don’t blame you. When you can find one, the prices are astronomical but most of the time you’ll just see ‘out of stock’ anyway. So what was the point?
These issues are mostly thanks to the semiconductor shortage. But cryptocurrency miners buying six to ten cards at a time certainly didn’t help. In an attempt to keep its gaming cards in the hands of gamers, Nvidia released LHR versions of its GeForce RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti cards. This was definitely Nvidia looking out for the world’s gamers and not an attempt to get everyone to buy its dedicated mining cards that are often close to double the price. Thanks, Nvidia! /s
Those LHR cards have a slightly modified bios that pretty much halve the hashrate when mining with the ethhash algorithm. This greatly reduced the profitability of buying those cards for mining Ethereum. But since the cards are cheaper, a free software tool to ‘fix’ that modification is very attractive. Enter Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker.
Something smells virus-y
Over on the Red Panda Mining YouTube channel, community members ChumpchangeXD and Y3TI went through the program with a fine-tooth comb and found that the program definitely contains malicious files. You can view the video below, if you’ve got a spare 80 minutes.
If you’ve got somewhere to be but still want to see how the viruses behave, you can check out Joe’s Sandbox Cloud. You’ll find a complete breakdown of all the naughty things Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker’s virus will attempt to exact on your system, including increased CPU usage, checking for system drives, and compromising the PowerShell utility. After all that, it doesn’t even do what it promised.
The original GitHub page for the tool has been taken down but if you do happen to find the tool out in the wild, avoid it like the plague. Or, better yet, report it where possible.
