Hardware destroying virii?

[SinsFeelNatural]

This is not an attempt to gain info for attacking another machine but simply a question needing to be answered with information to back it up.

Are there any current virii developed or released that can physically damage/kill hardware?

I would imagine there are virii out there that can low level format your hdd but not really damage it.

I am wondering because I was asked this question at work today and I informed the student that I did not believe there are such virii released.

[SinsFeelNatural]

Okay I have discovered one that can do this W95/CIH.1003 (http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=10300)

This can mis-flash your bios thus destroying the bios chip and in affect "breaking" the motherboard for the average computer user.

[Beast Of Blight]

I'm sure other viri could also, say, OC your video card to 5000core 5000ram and blow it up.

or up the core volt on your CPU to 5Gigavolts. :D


Donno if theres any virii that DO this, but its possible.. i guess.

[Chris]

I have heard of one before that destroys the harddrive by constantly accessing the harddrive, witch moves the arm inside back and forth until the platters are damaged or something along those lines.

[XWRed1]

I have heard of one before that destroys the harddrive by constantly accessing the harddrive,

I don't think so, if that was all it took to destroy a hard drive, there'd be ALOT more hard drive griping than just Deskstar complaints.

[RED Hot Machine]

There is no way that they could write a program that physically damage any of your hardware. Due to that fact that it is software.

Mis flashing bios's, formating hds etc are all software fixable.

[Chris]

Originally posted by XWRed1


I don't think so, if that was all it took to destroy a hard drive, there'd be ALOT more hard drive griping than just Deskstar complaints.

Yeah it does sound a bit odd but thats what a guy at college told me anyway, I cant remember exactly what he said, but it was something along those lines, it made the arm inside perform eratically and destroy the disk. Maybe he was wrong I dont know im just repeating what I heard :)

[su root]

Not so much nowadays, but in the old days, you could send bad commands to a device, and cause it to damage itself. These kinds of attacks didn't go very far (not too many people had that exact hardware that was prone.). Things like flashing BIOS with a bad image came out, but even those are protected against nowadays.

With the movement to NT based OSes, there is a HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer, which seperates software programs from directly commanding hardware. (That's why most of the time BIOS flashing cannot be done inside windows)

It is still possible to damage hardware though. For example, I can use Nero to overburn a CD, and potentially cause the burner to damage itself if it overburns too far..

[stan03]

Originally posted by Beast Of Blight
I'm sure other viri could also, say, OC your video card to 5000core 5000ram and blow it up.

or up the core volt on your CPU to 5Gigavolts. :D


Donno if theres any virii that DO this, but its possible.. i guess.

but could my mobo even do that....? if it recieved the command would it actually happen? i mean im pretty limited voltage wise and i don't think even a "bad command" would break it?

[su root]

Originally posted by stan03
but could my mobo even do that....? if it recieved the command would it actually happen? i mean im pretty limited voltage wise and i don't think even a "bad command" would break it?
If the CPU's voltage is controlled by BIOS instead of jumpers, then it's not inconcievable that it could be taken over & used to fry your CPU..

[mbentley]

Originally posted by Chris
I have heard of one before that destroys the harddrive by constantly accessing the harddrive, witch moves the arm inside back and forth until the platters are damaged or something along those lines.

if that was the case, i would bet defrag would automatically run itself cause a badly fragmented hard drive can cause the head to move quite a bit when accessing data. there may be come virii that can disable your hardware (to the average user the hardware would be destroyed) due to things like the bios flash like you guys mentioned, but there isn't secret code out there that can just damage a piece of hardware.

the reason why there aren't many of these types of virii is because each piece of hardware would require a different virus because there are so many differences between the motherboards and such...

sure people could writing virii that could lead to an early death to hardware due to over-usage, (such as the hard drive arm moving constantly), but hardware damage isn't what most are after when creating a virus.

[XWRed1]

Actually, I do remember hearing that with drives from the old dos days, you could command them to do something like read from a sector that is obviously beyond the edge of the platter, and the drive would just try to move it's arm out there - which would mess things up.