Can you ever imagine a music video released by Janet Jackson in 1989 is now posing as a security threat to some laptops as it could crash them as soon as they expose themselves to the song frequencies?
Yes, security researchers have now found that Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation Music Video can impose denial of service attacks in some laptops, prompting their hard drives to crash or malfunction.
Such phenomenon is occurring because of some frequency issues that are being generated by the song making the Hard Disk Drives (HDD) platters stop working, thus causing disruption to operations.
The reality is that some laptops that might operate on Windows XP could house such models of hard drives that might have been manufactured before 2005. All other latest ones are nowadays housing Solid State Drives that consume less power, are super-fast and are in compact size than their other HDD counterparts.
Microsoft Blogger Raymond Chen has addressed the issue as old and salted it with some info via a tweet. Chen said that the song playing not only affects the laptop that is playing the song, but the frequencies are so powerful that they can also affect other laptops due to resonating frequencies generated in the models that are operating on 5400 RPM.
To solve such issues, manufactures have induced a customized filter into the audio pipeline to detect and remove such aberrant frequencies in audio playbacks.
NOTE- Can cyber criminals or those with bad intentions use such resonant frequencies in songs to crash hard drives in the future? Well, these days nothing seems to be impossible to our human brain as it all depends on the technology and the hands that are using it!
