Hackers Can Steal Your Data by Listening to Your Hard Drive

New research shows that sensitive info like passwords can be transmitted using the sounds from hard drive motors.

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Intelligence agencies have developed a number of ways to prevent hackers getting access to their systems, and one of the best ways to keep a system safe is to remove it from the network entirely. If a computer isn't connected to the internet, the thinking does, it's impossible for anyone to breach it remotely.

But according to a new study, even that may not be enough. Researchers from Ben-Gurion University developed malware that commandeered the motors on a computer's hard drive to transmit information to a listening phone.

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On a traditional hard drive, information is stored on metal disks called platters. Inside the drive is a moving arm controlled by a motor, and at the end of the arm is a magnetic head that reads the data. Moving the magnetic head back and forth across the platter accesses different sets of data.

But moving the magnetic head and the motorized arm produces sound, and the researchers figured out that they could use malware to program the motor to transmit specific sounds. By placing a smartphone with a microphone nearby, the researchers could transmit data from a computer with no internet connection. In the video demo you can see the phone recording data one 1 or 0 at a time.

A few months ago, these same researchers demonstrated a similar exploit using the noise from CPU fans, but this new method works even when the fans are turned off. Although the speed of data transmission is slow—about 3 bits per second—that's still fast enough to transmit passwords or encryption keys in a few minutes.

Source: ArXiv

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