Another Reason To Switch To SSDs (Solid State Drives): Your Hard Drive Sounds Allow For Your Data To Be Stolen

Hard Drive Sounds Used to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Computers (+Video)

Ryan Whitwam | August 12, 2016

No matter how hard you try to keep a computer secure, there’s probably someone who can find a way to remotely access it and compromise the data it contains. The safest way to keep a system from being hacked is simply to disconnect it from all networks and other methods of communication. If it’s not connected to anything, there’s no available avenue for a hack. This is called air-gapping, and it’s commonly used in high security scenarios.
However, a number of interesting theoretical exploits have been found that could still pull data from an air-gapped system. For example, BitWhisper can use heat scanning to retrieve data from a non-networked PC. 

"Cornell Researchers Demo 'DiskFiltration' Hack That Steals Passwords And Crypto Keys Via Hard Drive Sounds. August 12, 2016" Source: http://hothardware.com/news/cornell-researchers-demo-diskfiltration-hack

[Click on link for video.] Source: http://hothardware.com/news/cornell-researchers-demo-diskfiltration-hack

<more at http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233602-hard-drive-sounds-used-to-steal-data-from-air-gapped-computers; related articles and links: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/201870-bitwhisper-stealing-data-from-non-networked-computers-using-heat (BitWhisper: Stealing data from non-networked computers using heat. March 24, 2015) and http://hothardware.com/news/cornell-researchers-demo-diskfiltration-hack (+Video) (Cornell Researchers Demo 'DiskFiltration' Hack That Steals Passwords And Crypto Keys Via Hard Drive Sounds. August 12, 2016)>