Security News > 2022 > August > Laptop denial-of-service via music: the 1980s R&B song with a CVE!
According to Chen, a major laptop maker of the day complained that Windows was prone to crashing when certain music was played through the laptop speaker.
The crashes, it seems were not limited to the laptop playing the song, but could also be provoked on nearby laptops that were exposed to the "Vulnerability-triggering" music, and even on laptops from other vendors.
Apparently, the ultimate conclusion was that Rhythm Nation just happened to include beats of the right pitch, repeated at the right rate, that provoked a phenomenon known as resonance in the laptop disk drives of the day.
Chen reports that the laptop vendor added a frequency filter to the laptop's own audio system in order to remove the frequency bands that tended to produce the problem, thus leaving the sound audibly unchanged but acoustically harmless.
A certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with laptop PCs in approximately 2005, allows physically proximate attackers to cause a denial of service via a resonant-frequency attack with the audio signal from the Rhythm Nation music video.
Whereas R&B might have been the Achilles heel of rotating-media storage devices in the early 2000s, perhaps louder but lower-tuned, sludgy, old-school "Coding music" might ultimately prove to be too much for fully digital solid-state laptop storage?