Sound attacks

2018: The sound attacks can put notebooks and the medical equipment out of action

In May, 2018 it became known that using the acoustic attack malefactors are capable to cause failures in operation of hard drives that can lead to program and hardware malfunctions in a broad spectrum of the devices equipped with HDD drives - from computers and video surveillance systems to medical devices.

The hacker equipment in a research "Blue Note: How Intentional Acoustic Interference Damages Availability and Integrity in Hard Disk Drives and Operating Systems" was described by specialists in information security field from the Michigan and Chzhetszyansky universities.

Using the acoustic attack malefactors are capable to cause failures in operation of hard drives that can lead to program and hardware malfunctions in a broad spectrum of the devices equipped with HDD drives

The attack does not require the special equipment, it is enough to lose a sound through the loudspeakers which are built in computers or external acoustics. Using sound and ultrasonic waves researchers broke operation of magnetic hard drives on different devices during information read or write on them.

The essence of the equipment is that the audible sound used for the attack strengthens vibration in a magnetic head assembly (Head Stack Assembly, HSA) the hard drive that leads to the shift of heads and breaks reading/record process. As for ultrasound, it provokes false operation of the shock sensor provided for protection of HDD against damages at blow. As a result the hard drive receives an unnecessary command for the parking of a head.

During the experiments the attack lasting 12 seconds using specially generated acoustic noises led to loss of video data in video surveillance systems of production of Ezviz company. One more attack which continued more than 105 seconds, caused serious failure in the 3.5-inch hard drive of Western Digital: data writing in it completely stopped, and normalization of work of HDD required reset of a video surveillance system. Also the method worked on notebooks and desktop PCs running OS Windows and Linux.

Specialists with alarm noted that HDD remain extended in areas, critical in terms of security, such as medical devices and other demanded equipment.^[1]

Notes

See Also