  The membrane paradigm approach to black hole physics introduces the notion of
a stretched horizon as a fictitious time-like surface endowed with physical
characteristics such as entropy, viscosity and electrical conductivity. We show
that certain properties of the stretched horizons are encoded in the
quasinormal spectrum of black holes. We compute analytically the lowest
quasinormal frequency of a vector-type perturbation for a generic black hole
with a translationally invariant horizon (black brane) in terms of the
background metric components. The resulting dispersion relation is identical to
the one obtained in the membrane paradigm treatment of the diffusion on
stretched horizons. Combined with the Buchel-Liu universality theorem for the
membrane's diffusion coefficient, our result means that in the long wavelength
limit the black brane spectrum of gravitational perturbations exhibits a
universal, purely imaginary quasinormal frequency. In the context of
gauge-gravity duality, this provides yet another (third) proof of the
universality of shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in theories with
gravity duals.
