A fake Ethereum mining fix for Nvidia GPUs was actually malware

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

The tool that was released on GitHub advertised the ability to unlocked the full ethereum mining capabilities of recent graphics cards, but it actually contained malicious software. The initial promising utility, called "Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker", claimed to remove Nvidia's lite hsy rate.

Members of the mining community Chump changeXD and Y3TI shared that the tool contained multiple viruses in a video on the Red Panda Mining channel.

Tom's Hardware says that the tool doesn't even perform the function of removing the cap on the hash rate for yourGPU. It apparently causes a host of other unusual behavior, like highCPU usage, checking for system drives, and raising some red flags. Joe's SandBox Cloud is a cool site that shows how a malicious file can spread through a system.

There has been a huge demand for earlier RTX cards that don't have a limitation on the number of concurrent users. It is tempting to remove the limit from newer cards in order to reduce demand. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.