Nvidia Graphics Driver Vulnerabilities Allow Hackers To Spy On Your PC

Nvidia has released new drivers for its graphics cards, which fix several security problems that open the doors to a potential attacker.

The company confirmed that the latest driver update actually covers six security holes that have not been made public until now.

The problem actually affects the controllers, or drivers, that allow strangers to access the system due to various bugs that can lead to denial of service, privilege escalation, data manipulation, or information filtering.

When Nvidia released version 461.09 of its ‘Game Ready’ drivers for graphics cards this week, there was some surprise among the community; these drivers are digitally signed as WHQL, something that happens only with the most important versions that include more news.

However, a glance at what’s new list for these drivers tells us that they are not very important — fixed some relatively minor issues, including one that caused a blue screen when three 4K monitors are connected. But it was striking that there was no information on improvements or compatibility with new games, as is usual.

That’s because Nvidia has actually released these new drivers to fix six serious security issues; the most dangerous of all has a CVSS vulnerability score of 8.4, for offering a possible attacker the escalation of privileges, accessing and taking control of the computer.

There is a lot of confusion in the way Nvidia has not discussed these issues; Although it has made them public, they only appear in Nvidia’s monthly security bulletin, a document that the vast majority of users do not consult. 

If you have seen that there is an update and that it only fixes a few bugs, you may have thought that it is not worth updating; many users actually avoid it, because sometimes an update can degrade performance or introduce new bugs.

But this is one of those cases in which you have to update even if it does not seem so important. The bugs discovered are very serious, although it must be clarified that taking advantage of them is not so easy.

It is advisable to install the update to version 461.09, which includes the patches, and which can be downloaded from the official Nvidia website.