Researchers Use Sonic Attacks to crash Hard Drives

Researchers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University demonstrated proof-of-concept acoustic and ultrasonic attacks that can disrupt magnetic hard disk drives by exciting resonant frequencies and fooling built-in shock/accelerometer sensors, causing read/write failures and potential head crashes; experiments used off-the-shelf speakers and signal generators, and while the attacks are technically feasible and could affect safety-critical systems that still rely on HDDs, the work is presented as controlled research with no reported active exploitation.