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Hardware destorying virus

K

Kekewy

Member
Today while at work, a customer told me he heard about a virus that only effects windows vista machines and is somehow able to destory the computer's motherboard. This sounds like a load of BS to me, and a google search turned up nothing of the sort. So, I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone had heard anything about it so if this guy comes back I can tell him in confidence he's full of it.
 
He's full of it. The only way I could see that working is if a virus installed an overclocking utility, and then overvolted the mb. There's so many hoops something like that would have to jump through that it would be virtually impossible to pull off. In addition to that, the virus would have to be mb specific. Not something that pays off well for mischief or profit.
 
A few years ago I asked a similar question here, and someone replied claiming that the Chernobyl virus supposedly damaged his motherboard. I specifically recall him saying, "and it wasn't pretty." I'm thinking maybe he claimed it damaged the northbridge or southbridge, but I'm not sure.

I never got around to researching it, so don't hold me to any of this. I'm just relaying that comment that someone else made.
 
Interesting. As I said, I never took the time to research it (until now). 😛

So it seems the comment was right in that Chernobyl did in fact damage the BIOS chip in certain machines (not the northbridge or southbridge, however). Maybe that other commenter had to replace the BIOS chip on his mobo and maybe that's why he said, "and it wasn't pretty."

I'd like to know if the scumbag that wrote CIH got any kind of punishment. The Wikipedia article didn't say.
 
The only virus that will destroy motherboards is the Andromeda Strain. It eats the organic material in the substrate. But then, it is a work of fiction too...
 
I kinda' miss the good old days when folks wrote viruses just to damage things and catch people's attention. It was very obvious when you got infected. Nowadays, most of them attempt to be innocuous and silently try to steal information.

About twenty years ago, there was a virus that was claimed to damage monitors. My recollection is it damaged monochrome monitors, probably by setting the refresh rate to higher frequencies than the monitor could handle. Nowadays, monitors will shut down, but not then.
 
I heard of a virus that writes and seeks on the hard drive at the same time. the computer is hosed either when the drive is full or the drive arm goes bad.
 
Well about a year ago there actually was a bug in a linux driver that could blow your network card. I never figured that was possible, but apparently it is... so if a bad linux driver can do it, can't see why a windows virus could not. I'm sure there must be limitations to what it can do though otherwise we'd be seeing tons of these all the time.
 
MustISO said:
Maybe a BIOS virus but nothing that will physically damage the mobo.
Click to expand...

If you can overwrite the bios, you can destroy the motherboard.

"Oh look, the northbridge now needs 10v instead of 1. ZZzztt."

That being said, it would require a LOT of steps to get infected, especially on a vista machine. It would have the potential of being very hardware specific.
 
Most machines are protected against attacks on the BIOS nowadays. I find that very unlikely to happen. generally speaking software can't damage hardware, although there are a few possible if difficult ways of doing it.

I have heard of a release of ubuntu killing hard drives because the disk IO was coded poorly and the hard drive was constantly working. it just wore it out. But ultimately something solid state can't be broken by software, even if ti is corrupted, like the BIOS, you can always reload the ROM if it is worth that much to you.
 
Ken90630 said:
Interesting. As I said, I never took the time to research it (until now). 😛

So it seems the comment was right in that Chernobyl did in fact damage the BIOS chip in certain machines (not the northbridge or southbridge, however). Maybe that other commenter had to replace the BIOS chip on his mobo and maybe that's why he said, "and it wasn't pretty."

I'd like to know if the scumbag that wrote CIH got any kind of punishment. The Wikipedia article didn't say.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Ing_Hau

Nothing happened too him
 
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