Microsoft reveals how Windows 10/11 nearly broke PCs from an official cyberthreat song

Back in August 2022, Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen told the interesting tale of how a certain song was getting systems to crash. As it turns out, the song in question was Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation which would be causing 2.5-inch 5400 RPM laptop hard disk drives (HDDs) to go haywire and crash as certain frequencies played in the song would match with the resonant frequency of the HDDs.

The story did not reveal what those frequencies were, but we noted last time, based on available research information, that hard drives would vibrate anywhere between 0 and 5,000 Hz with peaks at 12.5, 87.5, 1100, 1450, 1700, and 1850 Hz, so some of those frequency points must have aligned that triggered the resonance.

Just a day after this, the song was listed as an official exploit by the MITRE and was validated and tracked under ID CVE-2022-38392, which, as funny as it sounds, essentially makes listening to Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation a cyber threat.

Microsoft has long patched this problem and hence it should not be a reason for worry. Besides, most modern systems would be unaffected anyway, as they run SSDs that are not mechanical in nature like HDDs.

Later on, Chen also shared how Microsoft understood that the usage of heavier 3.5-inch HDDs would cause a dampening effect that prevented this problem. However, that wasn't a feasible solution since laptops require smaller and lighter storage. So, a software approach was taken to mitigate the issue via the usage of APO or Audio Processing Objects.

For those wondering how APO helped, they essentially helped filter or cut out those troublesome frequencies in the song as APO is essentially software-based DSP or digital signal processing.

Earlier this week, Raymond Chen shared the third part of this story, explaining how an update to Windows APO operations nearly broke laptops, again.

As it turns out, after Windows 7, Microsoft added an option to turn off all filtering via APO using the “Disable all audio enhancements” setting, and this in turn also disabled the filters specifically set for the Janet Jackson song.

Thankfully, upon request, an exception was granted for this or else we would have had plenty of modern Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and even early Windows 11 PCs crashing had someone disabled the APO functionality, cause let's face it, sound settings aren't the first thing a user would think of if a system began misbehaving and malfunctioning.

This situation sort of is similar to how automatic BitLocker on Windows 11 24H2 is allegedly leading to data loss of unaware and unprepared users.

Source: Microsoft

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of March): 1,357

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend