A Janet Jackson song has been identified as a cybersecurity vulnerability Playing it crashed some computers in the Windows XP era

A Janet Jackson song might crash some laptops back in the days of Windows XP. Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen recounted the incident on Wednesday, claiming to have heard the story from a colleague in Windows XP product support. According to the blog post, Jackson’s 1989 hit song “Rhythm Nation” might disrupt a 5400 RPM laptop hard drive model used in various laptops.

Microsoft learned of the problem when a laptop maker informed the company’s Windows team regarding the mysterious flaw. Initially, the company thought it had something to do with the Rhythm Nation music video playing on laptops. But what made the problem even weirder was that the Rhythm Nation clip was also crashing Windows laptops owned by the manufacturer’s competitors.

Janet Jackson’s 1989 music video “Rhythm Nation” was recognized as a cybersecurity vulnerability following Microsoft reported it might crash old laptops.

A colleague of mine shared a story regarding Windows XP product support, said 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 machines from several manufacturers also crashed. Sometimes playing the video on one laptop would crash another nearby laptop.

The investigation revealed that all of the failed laptops shared the same 5400 rpm hard drive.

It turns out the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400 RPM model of laptop hard drives 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 when playing audio. Of course, with modern machines, this problem is rather anecdotal. Moreover, almost nobody listens to Janet Jackson anymore (you do? Really?).

The risk of sound vibrations disturbing a hard drive is certainly surprising. But the problem has actually been known in computer circles for years. In his blog post, Chen linked to a video from 2008 regarding how shouting at storage drives in a data center can cause increased latency.

Sent by Raymond Chen

A colleague of mine shared a story regarding Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” music video would crash certain laptop models. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the lab they had to set up to investigate this problem.

One discovery during the investigation was that playing the video clip also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.

And then they discovered something extremely strange*: playing the video clip on one laptop caused a nearby laptop to crash, even though that other laptop was not playing the video*!

What was happening ?

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.

The manufacturer got around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

And I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do Not Delete” sticker on that audio filter. (Although I’m afraid that in the many years since the workaround was added, no one remembers why it was there. Hopefully their laptops no longer carry this audio filter to protect once morest damage to a hard drive model they no longer use).

And of course, no story regarding natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

The Miter Corporation saw fit to list it on the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Registry – the definitive list of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that we all need to be aware of.

It is listed as CVE-2022-38392 and has already been acknowledged 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 the memory to emit radiation in the same bands used by Wi-Fi and encoding information in these emissions.

Owners of laptops 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 a link to “Rhythm Nation” in this story (phew, saved!!!!).

Sources : Microsoft, Windows Dev Docs, CVE-2022-38392, Tenable

And you?

How do you read it?
Are you surprised to know that audio frequencies might crash computers?
do you listen to Janet Jackson?
Do you think this problem deserves to be recognized as a security vulnerability? Why ?
Have you ever listened to a song that causes a similar problem?