Acoustic attack this time against HDDs

Not so long ago DolphinAttack it targets voice-based digital assistants, while blue note targets hard drives.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University have demonstrated a novel form of attack. The so-called blue note targets traditional magnetic hard disk drives. Acoustic interference can cause serious damage to the storage of desktop and laptop computers, and in addition to file system errors, you can even restart or shut down the operating system. The blue note, of course, is based on the problem that the read heads of hard disks tolerate vibrations extremely poorly, and it has also been proven that ultrasounds can be used to trick the vibration sensor, which is used to prevent head-on collisions. These are the effects that, taken together, can cause very serious errors.

In addition, attackers do not necessarily need special devices, the thing can in principle be combined with a laptop's built-in speaker, but other sound sources nearby can also be used. The blue note can obviously be a really serious weapon in the hands of criminals, as even today, storage devices that work with magnetic disks are used in many security-critical places (medical devices, camera systems, etc.). The good news, however, is that researchers have created a firmware to alleviate the offensive acoustic interference, which could be a useful help in the aforementioned areas - of course, SSDs can easily remedy this problem.

Source: guru3d.com