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Sonic and Ultrasonic Attacks Damage Hard Drives and Crash OSes (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the bad-cover-songs dept.

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: 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. The device uses flash storage to house its firmware, but by default it uses a magnetic HDD to store the large quantities of video it records. The attack used a speaker hanging from a ceiling that rested about four inches above the surveillance system's HDD. The researchers didn't remove the casing or otherwise tamper with the surveillance system. The technique was also able to disrupt HDDs in desktop and laptop computers running both Windows and Linux. In some cases, it even required a reboot before the PCs worked properly. The paper titled "Blue Note: How Intentional Acoustic Interference Damages Availability and Integrity in Hard Disk Drives and Operating Systems" can be found here (PDF).

2 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Destructive resonances by drdread66 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I saw a related phenomenon in ~2006. My employer was developing some software for a DoD system. Everything worked great in our lab but weird things happened when installed on the servers that the Government bought. It took us *months* to figure out that the problem was a resonance between the hard drives and the cooling fans. After an hour or so of running, the drives would stop working.

    We contacted the manufacturer of the hardware and they (a) replaced the fans with fans of a different RPM and (b) isolated the fans with rubber mounts. The problem disappeared immediately and never returned.

  2. Shouting in the datacenter by ccool · · Score: 4, Informative

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    I'm surprised no one mentioned this link before...