alt.hn

5/14/2026 at 4:19:29 PM

HDD Firmware Hacking

 https://icode4.coffee/?p=1465

by jsploit

5/14/2026 at 7:32:08 PM

Related, someone decompiled Samsung’s 840 EVO ssd firmware, before Samsung later started encrypting it: http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf

Came across it looking how to deal with multiple different samsung drives caught in bad states due to shitty firmware. My original salty post warning about vendor branded Samsung drives on eBay is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37165189

by Modified3019

5/15/2026 at 4:36:30 AM

Samsung has lost any credibility they had as a competent manufacturer years ago. Their other products are beyond junk (fridges, washing machines…), their customer service is abysmal (they managed to “repair” my mp3 player and smartphone by returning it even more broken than they got it, and I’ve seen how the company works from the inside when they bought a startup I was working at. I know many people with Samsung fridges failing after a few years (or having too little coolant in them so that they make loud popping sounds when running and Samsung saying you’re holding it wrong)

From these experiences, I’m going out of my way to never buy anything made by Samsung.

by ornornor

5/15/2026 at 7:54:24 AM

You forget exploding devices or the decision of selling it's crap exynos thing in Europe

by ike____________

5/15/2026 at 9:05:18 AM

Right. And their complete contempt for user privacy on their smart TVs. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I'll even pay extra to buy anything but a Samsung device.

by ornornor

5/15/2026 at 9:30:37 AM

How do I know if I have a drive in this situation?

by saagarjha

5/14/2026 at 9:50:49 PM

This deserves its own blog post and HN submission. Since SSDs have been 2x to 4x prices people are now more likely to buy used and could get burned.

BTW thank you for raising this.

by alecco

5/15/2026 at 1:07:46 AM

The obfuscation hardware vendors do is so trivial, why do they even bother?

One of the current vendor provided consumer SSD firmware update utilities for Linux as a live-usb decrypts the firmware and writes it out to disk decrypted before uploading it, so simply using seccomp to fail a rmdir syscall nets you the decrypted version without having to reverse engineer any of the updater/decryption code.

I deleted my own negative rant about SSD manufacturers not opting in to lvfs/fwupd when drives have a high risk of bricking without firmware updates.

by turpentine

5/15/2026 at 2:44:12 AM

>why do they even bother

So when you start publishing their code they can DMCA you.

by pixl97

5/15/2026 at 8:42:09 AM

Except that DMCA 512 (notice and takedown) is a different section than DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) and you don't have to be using any DRM of any kind to use the former because they're unrelated.

Also, wouldn't someone trying to distribute "illicit copies" just distribute the original unmodified file since it's a self-extracting binary with no license check? And what reason would anyone have to do that when they already publish it for free on their own site, and why should they care if someone did?

by AnthonyMouse

5/14/2026 at 6:08:31 PM

This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself.

If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to just send the thing to a data recovery lab, have them swap the platters onto an unmodified model and get a raw image of the data to work with. (Or maybe the key is hidden inside the drive firmware chip itself?)

by morpheuskafka

5/14/2026 at 9:17:00 PM

i still have mine too! managed to talk to the microcontroller and dump its firmware, but didn't know enough about how to make it arbitrarily run code without worrying about ruining it all

by jareklupinski

5/14/2026 at 6:43:39 PM

Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea...

The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different.

If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977643

- https://redballoonsecurity.com/careers/

Be sure to mention Hacker News if you apply.

by red_balloon

5/15/2026 at 9:04:18 AM

As a data point for anyone curious, they're US based ("Midtown West in New York City") and their careers page mentions the roles are all in-office ones.

Ah well. ;)

by justinclift

5/14/2026 at 7:20:56 PM

I'm glad you all are still doing this challenge. Ang handed one to me at Defcon 6 or 7 years ago and it's one of the most interesting challenges I've ever attempted.

Didn't finish it but learned a ton.

For anyone reading, Red Balloon is a great place with great people and I highly recommend anyone remotely interested give them a look.

by busterarm

5/15/2026 at 12:22:42 AM

The Red Balloon website looks AI generated.

by HDBaseT

5/15/2026 at 1:52:40 AM

1) so what? 2) evidence? 3) it's very obviously a wordpress site using elementor 4) the content really hasn't changed a ton in the last 10 years or so as far as I can tell 5) again, so what?

by busterarm

5/14/2026 at 11:49:36 PM

May I have a challenge drive just for the challenge (not interested in switching jobs)?

by dmitrygr

5/15/2026 at 4:30:59 AM

One of my favorite things to do is update the firmware of devices. I know it is often ill-advised because if it is working fine, why risk something going wrong? But it’s kind of fun to imagine gaining tiny speed increments with optimizations. I like to do it on Fridays - Firmware Fridays - vacuum cleaners, hard drives, motherboards, ip cameras, Apple IIGS expansion cards, Bluetooth scales, and on and on.

by system7rocks

5/14/2026 at 6:48:57 PM

There's also another very good series of articles about hacking the firmware of a HDD, with modifications of /etc/shadow hashed passwords: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

by boricj

5/15/2026 at 2:26:42 AM

The fact that vendors still ship firmware with trivial obfuscation in 2026 is wild. I wonder how many data recovery shops already reverse-engineer these routinely but just don't publish.

by ElenaDaibunny

5/15/2026 at 2:45:25 AM

Not publishing is the point of why they {{{encrypt}}} it.

Start publishing it and it's a good chance you'll get a DMCA notice in short order.

by pixl97

5/14/2026 at 9:49:07 PM

Since this is xb360, this is SATA rather than IDE, but in a similar vein I am really looking forward to my PicoIDE to play with adversarial hdd controllers in real systems.

by monocasa

5/15/2026 at 7:39:09 AM

You can put picoide behind SATA_IDE bridge too

by rasz

5/15/2026 at 6:22:38 AM

how can i upvote this twice?

by spr-alex

5/14/2026 at 6:43:11 PM

[dead]

by andijati2