Vulnerability that old HDD crashes when playing Janet Jackson's hit song is a hot topic

It has been reported that the HDD installed in the old PC breaks down when playing the hit song ' Rhythm Nation ' released by Janet Jackson in 1989.

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220816-00/?p=106994

Old laptop hard drives will allegedly crash when exposed to Janet Jackson music | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/janet-jacksons-rhythm-nation-is-officially-a-security-threat-for-some-old-laptops/

A CVE ID was issued by The MITER Corporation , which supports the US government in the field of server security, for the vulnerability that HDD breaks down when playing Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation'.

The vulnerability in question is ' CVE-2022-38392 ', and when playing 'Rhythm Nation' on a specific OEM HDD with a rotation speed of 5400 rpm shipped with a notebook PC around 2005, the audio signal of the song is attacked by a resonance frequency attack. A denial of service (device malfunction or system crash) can be caused by an attacker who gains physical access via

According to Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen, 'CVE-2022-38392' was originally discovered by a major computer manufacturer. It may affect not only the laptop playing Rhythm Nation, but also the devices around the laptop playing Rhythm Nation.

Technology media Ars Technica points out that it is very difficult to reproduce the vulnerability because the model of HDD or notebook PC that causes the problem is not specified. In addition, Ars Technica said, 'There may be some HDDs in notebook PCs in the Windows XP era that are still selling somewhere even after nearly 20 years, but most of them have reached the end of their life. It is also written.

You can watch 'Rhythm Nation' that unintentionally breaks down the HDD from the following, but those who use laptops with old HDDs should play at their own risk.

Janet Jackson-Rhythm Nation-YouTube


When laptops affected by this issue ship, the issue is partially resolved by the PC manufacturer. According to Chen, the solution to the problem by PC makers is to 'add custom filters to the audio pipeline to detect and remove problematic frequencies during audio playback.' However, these notebook PCs also crash the HDD when 'Rhythm Nation' is played around, so the problem is not completely solved. Also, 'Rhythm Nation' was clearly not popular in the early 2000s, so the problem was not widely recognized.