Hackers can 'hear' the sound from the hard drive to steal user data remotely

Hackers can not only take advantage of the noise from computer heat sinks to steal information from remote users, but also from the process of writing data to the hard drive. bad things. That's the conclusion of security researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.

As called DiskFiltration , this method of attack is based on the read-write control of the hard drive that moves back and forth on the disk surface. For ease of visualization, this reading is similar to the rotating platform but instead of standing still, it moves back and forth at extremely high speeds. In the process of moving, reading this will create the noise. Although noticeable, when you start the desktop, the user can hear the noise and part of the noise is from the computer hard drive.

This type of attack is based on the read-write control of the hard drive that moves back and forth on the disk surface.

Taking advantage of this principle, an attacker can install a malware on a user's machine, which controls the read-write process of the hard drive using the audio emitted to transmit sensitive data over a nearby device. without any need for a cellular connection. Audio after reaching the destination device will be decrypted, extracting sensitive data from the user.

The security research team said that DiskFiltration can operate in about 1.8 meters. However, the data rate is extremely slow, limited to about 180 bits per minute. However, this speed is sufficient to derive important key sequences, such as the 4096 bit RSA encryption algorithm that can be attacked and retrieved in about 25 minutes. For larger files, this approach is almost impossible, on the other hand requires installing malware on the victim's machine before proceeding.

Therefore, although not too serious, this study has once again affirmed weaknesses on older hard drives because this attack does not work for solid-state drives. .