Following a shutdown of its “NVIDIA Developer Zone” earlier this week after the online community for developers had been hacked, graphics chip maker NVIDIA on Friday also shut down its online store located at store.nvidia.com.
The group of hackers behind the attack, going by the handle of “The Appollo Project”, made mention of the claimed compromise in its original post exhibiting its successful attack against the NVIDIA Developer Zone site.
“Oh, and nVidia forgot to tell you that shop.nvidia.com has also been compromised. nVidia minimizing the affect that the hack will have on its stock price?” a pastebin post said.
While the company has shut down the online store, it has not acknowledged that a successful attack has taken place, but appears to be reacting proactively based on hacker claims, and successful attacks on other sites.
“NVIDIA has suspended operation of the NVIDIA Gear Store (store.nvidia.com) as a precaution, following confirmed attacks on several of our other sites,” a statement on the site posted on Jun 13 read.
Commenting on the developer forum hack, the claimed attackers noted, “We aren’t acting extremely maliciously, we’ve used this database to target disgusting corporations who deserve to be brought to justice.. and we are getting there, slowly but surely.”
Note that the attackers incorrectly referenced the site as “shop.nvidia.com” in their statement, rather than “store.nvidia.com” which was the domain of actual site taken offline by NVIDIA.
NVIDIA, a company that holds more the 5,000 patent and is credited with inventing the GPU, posted $3.54 billion in revenue in FY 2011, and currently has a market cap of more than $7.75 billion.
It’s not clear how much of the company’s revenue comes from its online store, but it’s likely minimal compared to its retail and OEM sales. Shares of NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) closed up 1.25% in trading on Friday.
The attack follows a string of attacks that occurred this week, including approximately 1M user accounts at Phandroid, an online community for Android users and developers, a breach at Yahoo! that led to the loss of 450,000 records, and attack on Formspring resulting in 420,000 hashed passwords being exposed. In other news, Best Buy reported an uptick in hacking attempts on their users’ accounts, and a vulnerability in web hosting control panel software Plesk that resulted in it being linked to a run of 50,000 websites being compromised.
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