If you happen to be a fan of the music Alternative rock band Coldplay puts out, here's a piece of news that you'd may find somewhat flattering. A firmware file for one of Kingston's NVMe SSDs has got Coldplay lyrics all over it. The lyrics are from the band's popular song The Scientist.
Security researcher Nicholas Stark found this bizarre thing while digging into Kingston's fimware updates. Stark reached out to BleepingComputer with this interesting news, naturally expressing surprise at such a finding. He said:
I found Coldplay lyrics in SSD controller firmware. I have absolutely no clue why it is in the firmware, I've seen many many firmware images in my time and this just seemed out of place
The firmware version which happens to bear these song lyrics is "SKC2000M8_S2681103." which is firmware for the KC2000 NVMe SSD. The update was released on Janurary 14, 2020, according to Kingston's website.
Here is an image of the BIN file inside the firmware where the song lyrics for The Scientist are clearly visible on the right side. At the moment, we do not know why those are there and if they serve any purpose, or if they put them in there to act as some sort of filler. In case you are not familiar with the song, you can view the lyrics on Coldplay's official website:
For those wondering perhaps, the official release notes for the SKC2000M8_S2681103 firmware update are as follows:
Firmware Rev. S2681103 (01-14-2020)
- Improved performance in some QD1 workloads
- Improvements related to TCG Opal
Sadly, there is no mention of inclusion of The Scientist song lyrics in the changelog. The firmware itself can be downloaded here (as ZIP file) if you like that sort of thing.
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