Sonic and ultrasonic attacks damage hard drives and crash OSes
Attackers can cause potentially harmful hard drive and operating system crashes by playing sounds over low-cost speakers embedded in computers or sold in stores, a team of researchers demonstrated last week.
The attacks use sonic and ultrasonic sounds to disrupt magnetic HDDs as they read or write data. The researchers showed how the technique could stop some video-surveillance systems from recording live streams. Just 12 seconds of specially designed acoustic interference was all it took to cause video loss in a 720p system made by Ezviz. Sounds that lasted for 105 seconds or more caused the stock Western Digital 3.5 HDD in the device to stop recording altogether until it was rebooted.
[...] "For such systems, the integrity of the recorded data is vital to the usefulness of the system, which makes them susceptible to acoustic interference or vibration attacks," the researchers wrote in a paper titled "Blue Note: How Intentional Acoustic Interference Damages Availability and Integrity in Hard Disk Drives and Operating Systems."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dbe on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:59PM (1 child)
That video shows that screaming at a server disk array increase latency:
(beware the sound is loud on that video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 [youtube.com]
-dbe
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 31 2018, @09:22PM
That is fucking hilarious! I don't know why, but there's something really satisfying about the fact that even a lifeless machine doesn't take abuse from people.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...