As side-channel attacks go, it’s one of the weirder ones we’ve heard of. But the tech news was filled with stories this week about how Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” is actually a form of cyberattack. It sounds a little hinky, but apparently this is an old vulnerability, as it was first noticed back in the days when laptops commonly had 5400-RPM hard drives. The vulnerability surfaced when the video for that particular ditty was played on a laptop, which would promptly crash. Nearby laptops of the same kind would also be affected, suggesting that whatever was crashing the machine wasn’t software related. As it turns out, some frequencies in the song were causing resonant vibrations in the drive. It’s not clear if anyone at the time asked the important questions, like exactly which part of the song was responsible or what the failure mode was on the drive. We’ll just take a guess and say that it was the drive heads popping and locking.
Speaking of security, news came out ahead of DEFCON of a vulnerability in the Emergency Alert System, the US civil preparedness notification system. The first part of the video below covers the vulnerability, which involves one brand of EAS encoder/decoder, a box all broadcasters are required to have in their studios, which might let an attacker override legit alerts or send out a false one. The original warning from the Department of Homeland Security urged broadcasters to patch its firmwa ..
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