Sound can wreak havoc on your hard drive

The power of sound is greater than we had imagined, security researchers have shown that an acoustic attack on hard drives can cause the PC to crash and cause file system corruption.

Sound can cause corruption of your hard drive and even physical damage

The acoustic attack in question has been named BlueNote, this attack causes intentional acoustic interference that causes unusual errors in the mechanics of hard drives in desktop and laptop computers, damaging the integrity and availability of both hardware and software, causing file system corruption and operating system restarts. Previously, several researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University demonstrated how a security camera was unable to record video with a similar acoustic attack.

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Experiment shows that audible sound causes a hard drive head assembly to vibrate outside of operating limits, ultrasonic sound causes false positives in the shock sensor, which is designed to avoid a head crash with the magnetic platter. This problem poses a challenge for traditional magnetic disks that are still widely used in safety critical applications such as medical devices and other widely used systems.

Researchers are already working on a firmware update to mitigate intentional noise interference, a method has been proposed that avoids unnecessary head parking by detecting ultrasonic activation of the shock sensor. SSD drives are not affected by this issue at all, as they lack any moving parts that may be affected by sound.

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