🎵 2022-08-18 07:47:45 – Paris/France.
The music video for Janet Jackson's 1989 pop hit Rhythm Nation has been recognized as a cybersecurity vulnerability after Microsoft reported it could crash old laptops.
"A colleague of mine shared a story about Windows XP product support," wrote Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen.
The story detailed how "a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation music video would crash certain laptop models."
Further investigation revealed that several manufacturers' machines also crashed. Sometimes playing the video on one laptop would crash another nearby laptop. It's mysterious because the song is not really ce times.
The investigation revealed that all of the failed laptops shared the same 5 rpm hard drive.
"It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400 RPM model of laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers were using," Chen wrote.
The manufacturer that found the problem apparently added a custom filter into the audio pipeline to detect and remove the offending frequencies during audio playback.
Few modern machines have hard drives, let alone drives that spin at the abnormally slow speed of 5400 rpm. Plus, hardly anyone listens to Janet Jackson anymore.
The register nevertheless reports this news because The Miter Corporation has seen fit to list it on the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Registry – the definitive list of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that we all need to be careful of.
It is listed as CVE-2022-38392 and has already been recognized by security vendor Tenable.
Although the bug looks comical, side channel attacks are a real threat. Israeli researcher Mordechai Guri has found ways to attack computers, including causing memory to emit radiation in the same bands used by Wi-Fi and encoding information in those emissions.
Laptop owners with old, slow hard drives should therefore be very careful if they hear Janet Jackson tunes while working – which is why we haven't included Rhythm Nation in this story.
But it's safe to remind readers of the strangest bug The register already encountered: Cisco's warning about cosmic rays crushing some kits. ®
SOURCE: Reviews News
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