Microsoft: Bug in Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” could crash a laptop
Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →
| CVE | Vulnerability | CVSS | EPSS | Flags | Affected | Exposure | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2022-38392 | Certain 5400 RPM hard drives, for laptops and other PCs in approximately 2005 and later, allow physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (devi Certain 5400 RPM hard drives, for laptops and other PCs in approximately 2005 and later, allow physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service (device malfunction and system crash) via a resonant-frequency attack with the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video. A reported product is Seagate STDT4000100 763649053447. NVD description · AI analysis pending | 5.3 | <1% |
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Full article356 words · extracted from therecord.media · click to collapse
Hide your laptops if you hear Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” — a bug related to the 1989 hit song has officially been declared a security issue in need of a CVE. Tagged as CVE-2022-38392, the vulnerability comes from a phenomenon discovered by Microsoft where playing “Rhythm Nation” would cause any laptop with a certain hard drive to crash. In its CVE page, the MITRE organization said the 5400 RPM OEM hard drives were shipped primarily with many laptop PCs around 2005. If played near these laptops, the song causes “a denial of service (device malfunction and system crash) via a resonant-frequency attack.” Microsoft’s Raymond Chen released a blog about the bug this week, explaining that a colleague of his working in Windows XP product support said a major computer manufacturer discovered the bug and noted that it even worked when “Rhythm Nation” was played from a nearby laptop. “It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used,” Chen explained. “The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.” What song do you think crashed the laptops? (Answer coming next week in Raymond's blog https://t.co/1B68XrVkow) Microsoft published a poll before releasing the blog asking Twitter to guess which song was the culprit behind the bug they discovered, with many guessing Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.” “Rhythm Nation” came in second place. Chen himself drew ties to the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse as another example of natural resonant frequencies. The poll led to a fun discussion among cybersecurity experts about similar audio-related quirks and vulnerabilities that could take down laptops. I was once working on a new desktop computer and I found that playing the game 101 Monochrome Mazes would reliably crash the machine. The hardware boffins investigated and discovered the trace to the speaker on the motherboard was too close to the reset trace.
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