Can damaged hard drive weaken Mac's security?

I heard that sometimes hard drive can get damaged (holding down the power button to force shut down, for example when system is completely frozen - it has happened once or twice for me, no idea why).

If hard drive is damaged, would it weaken security in some way? Like OS doesn't function properly and something develops security hole or security patches not working?

How would I know if hard drive is damaged?

Sorry for likely dumb question, but I'm trying to figure it out with absolutely no idea about tech.

Solution 1:

The entire question boils down to this:

How would I know if hard drive is damaged?

Your computer would start to fail - as in crash, errors would be thrown, it would freeze and perform slowly.

When a drive gets damaged, it doesn't suddenly read incorrect data or modified data; the data is corrupted. Data that can't be read will with cause (at minimum) an error or crash.

Can it weaken security?

Your computer wouldn't be functional by the time it weakened security. For example, if you are running File Valut, a damaged drive won't decrypt your drive; it won't function. Period.

If you somehow crash your firewall config, SIP (system integrity protection) will throw errors that system files have changed.

So, how do you know if your hard drive is damaged?

If you start getting crashes or freezes or performance problems, one of the things you can do is diagnostic like Apple Hardware Test (AHT). If you want to just check your disks, there is a nice GUI from Clever Files called DiskDrill (free for the basic utilities, $$ to activate the pro features). This will help you be proactive.

Solution 2:

You're basically asking the question "If my hard drive had different data, what might happen?" Unfortunately, this is a question that's basically impossible to answer specifically without knowing what data changed.

Imagine that somehow the drive was damaged in a way that modified data on the drive to coincidentally be equivalent to a virus. You'd now have a virus on your machine. On the other hand, that modified data could also just create a text file. It's entirely dependent on how the data changes.

Of course, both of these scenarios are extremely unlikely. Far more likely, you'll find some piece of your hard drive unreadable and lose some files or something.

So how will you know if something happens?

Check for SMART errors. SMART is a monitoring system that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability. If something goes wrong with the drive, SMART likely will report something wrong, and macOS will notify you. Of course, SMART isn't perfect, but it does help. Additionally, if something appears to be off, you can run Disk Utility's first aid, which will scan for and attempt to correct errors. Sadly, this system isn't perfect, and the HFS+ file system that macOS uses is fairly susceptible to bit rot, which is a form of data loss.

In general, the best strategy for preventing data loss is to keep backups. As for security: well, I wouldn't worry about it.