SSD Drives Vulnerable to Attacks That Corrupt User Data

[froggyboy604]

New research describes two vulnerabilities that could affect SSD drives utilizing MLC technology: "program interference" and "read disturb." In the first, an attacker can corrupt data or reduce the lifespan of a drive by writing data with a certain pattern: specifically, the data pattern makes an MLC's programming logic cause 4.9 more errors than usual.

For the second type of attack, exploit code can force an SSD to perform a large number of writes in a short period of time, which also results in data corruption and degradation of the drive's storage abilities. I'm going to assume these attacks are more complicated than described, since SSDs can stand up pretty well even when atypical amounts of data are being written.

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I think it is best to backup your data regularly, and also use a good antivirus and firewall to prevent these types of attacks from happening.

SSDs may not be good for devices like game consoles where there may not be any security programs or weak security which cause a hacker or virus maker to make a virus which wears out your SSD and corrupts your data like game saves, and digital game data.

I think I stick to using hard drives to store my data since it is cheaper where I can buy many large storage size hard drives to store my data, and it is not vulnerable to SSD data corruption attacks.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

I'm guessing this doesn't affect HDD?

 

[froggyboy604]

I'm guessing this doesn't affect HDD?

The article on the original website did not mention hard drives being vulnerable to this attack.

Most likely, these SSD data corruption attacks does not work on traditional spinning hard drives because hard drives uses different tech where it uses a magnetic head which is used to read and write data on a disc/platter which writes and stores data as 1 or 0 in binary number language on the platter.