Lapsus$ Hacking: Ubisoft Becomes the Next Target After NVIDIA and Samsung

Ubisoft admits to a cybersecurity incident that disrupted its internal systems. The group behind the hacking is Lapsus$, the same ransomware gang that hacked NVIDIA and Samsung.

Ubisoft reported that the personal information of their players was not exposed during the hack.

Ubisoft Hacking

According to The Verge, Ubisoft released a statement stating their system has experienced a cybersecurity incident. Ubisoft is a French video game company, popularly known as the makers of Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Assassin's Creed.

On Thursday, March 11, the company reported that the breach has temporarily affected numerous games, functions, and services in their internal systems.

Ubisoft did not mention any further information as to how it happened and who was behind the hacking in the statement they released.

For a few hours, there were no groups that came forward abruptly taking recognition of the hack and asking for demands.

However, the Lapsus$ hacking group hinted a message that they might have caused the cybersecurity incident.

Ubisoft assured its audience that their IT team with leading external experts are looking into the hack and investigating the vulnerabilities. Ubisoft assured its gamers that all its games and services are functioning and fully operational.

However, for additional security measures, the company encourages its users to have a site-wide password reset.

The company added that as of the moment, there was no evidence proving that any player's personal information was compromised and exposed as a byproduct of this cybersecurity incident.

Lapsus$ came to the public eye just recently after it made a massive breach inside NVIDIA and Samsung.

Nvidia Hacking

Lapsus$ gained notoriety for hacking NVIDIA, an American multinational technology company. Players, artists, and crypto miners popularly know this company as one of the best in creating graphic processing units.

Lapsus$ breached NVIDIA's system on Feb. 28. The group reportedly succeeded in stealing 1 TB of information from the tech giant.

It was revealed by NVIDIA that the company is aware that threat actors obtained sensitive information such as employee credentials and proprietary information from the company's computer system.

The hacking took place a day before the political onslaught in Russia and Ukraine happened. Numerous people believed that this was somehow correlated with the aggression in Eastern Europe. However, NVIDIA clarified that it has nothing to do with it.

NVIDIA also added that they were aware of the hacking that took place and made measures to counter the breach in their systems although their efforts were deemed unsuccessful.

The reason behind the Lapsus$ attack against NVIDIA is that they want to help the gaming and mining community by calling on NVIDIA to release an update for all GeForce RTX 30 Series Firmware, which will remove any restrictions placed on the cards by the company.

Samsung Hacking

Ubisoft and NVIDIA are not the only company compromised by the cyber group, Lapsus$ also hacked Samsung.

After the group hacked NVIDIA, the second company they came after was the South Korean tech giant, Samsung. Lapsus$ leaked a total of 190 GB of data from Samsung and made it all available to the public via free, downloadable torrent.

The ransomware gang was able to infiltrate Samsung's TrustZone environment used for sensitive operations and leaked the following data and source codes:

• Algorithms that will be used for all of the biometric unlock operations.
• The source code for the bootloader on all recent Samsung devices can be found here.
• The confidential source code that is given by Qualcomm.
• The source code for Samsung's activation servers.
• Complete source code for the technology that is used for authorizing and authenticating Samsung accounts, as well as APIs and other services

The breach was able to collect several Samsung Github repositories, including "mobile defense engineering, Samsung account backend, Samsung pass backend/frontend, and SES (Bixby, Smartthings, store)," according to the reports.