Janet Jackson’s best-known music video that she released 13 years ago called Rhythm Nation (1989) has been recognized as a cybersecurity vulnerability by Microsoft after several damaged laptops were reported.
It sounds funny but if you own an old laptop you could have some other problem if you are a big fan of Janet Jackson and you want to listen to one of her legendary songs Rhythm Nation (1989) again.
And it is that, a major computer manufacturer has sounded the alarm for an alleged cybersecurity failure as soon as this music video plays if you own a laptop a few years old.
“Turns out the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400RPM model of laptop hard drives they and other manufacturers used,” wrote Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen alerting all users to the problem.
In the investigation they specify that they are computers whose hard drive was 5400 revolutions per minute (Currently hard drives run at about 7200 RPM). They point out that there were even occasions when if a computer failed for this reason, if there was another nearby, the same thing happened. Of course a mystery.
As we have already mentioned, the story details how “A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation music video was crashing certain laptop models.”
However, The Register is reporting this news because it has been deemed appropriate to include it in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) registry, the definitive list of cybersecurity vulnerabilities we should all pay attention to. Listed as CVE-2022-38392.
Of course in this article we are not going to include this great song and video in case you are one of the unlucky ones. For everyone’s peace of mind, note that Few modern computers have hard drives, let alone drives that spin as slow as 5400 RPM.