virus hardware damage?

Can a virus cause hardware damage or not?


While waiting for the new antispyware from microsoft, I was trolling through some info and found this oddity on hardware.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...uses_what.mspx
On this microsoft page for viruses it states:

Note: No known viruses have the ability to damage computer hardware such as disk drives or monitors.
Warnings about viruses that can cause physical harm are either hoaxes or misinformation.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...s/imvirus.mspx
But then on this page it states this warning:

However, the virus might have installed a covert program on their computer that could damage software, hardware, or important files, and that may include spyware, which can track information entered on a computer.

My thoughts are that may be a distinct possibility.
TTn

[Mystwalker]

Well, as a computer virus is software, it can only advise the hardware to damage itself - and this only if the hardware provides the needed options.

The C64 floppy disk's write-read head can be controlled via software, so malware could do some harm there.
The graphics card can be advised to send "bad" signals (high frequency, high resolution, changing one/both of the latter frequently) to the monitor. Maybe some damage occurs when the monitor is not prepared for this.

And so on...

"the virus might have installed a covert program/s"

The virus is somewhat the reproductive part.
The malware could be the self destructing part.
The spyware is the intelligence part, that reacts to the environment and, information that's entered.

Natural random variants, are also of slight concern.
An organic computer virus, of sorts.

[Peter Nelson]

I believe it is certainly possible to cause some hardware damage using software (eg malware / virus).

Here are some examples: WARNING DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

Your graphics card might be put into a mode with very high refresh rates/resolutions which are beyond the capability of your monitor.
Or rapid switching between this and a conventional resolution.

Either of these are likely to write off an older monitor (and some recent ones).

Additionally, virus might turnoff/turn down your fan speed control on the cpu/hard drive/psu/system fan where these a variably controlled using temperature sensors. At the same time as running some processor intensive thing equivalent to torture test. This would cause overheating and probably permanent damage to the cpu etc.

It may be possible to tell the hard drive to park its heads on the media surface rather than in the parking zone or reconfigure the drive geometry so it physically attempts to address areas of the drive which do not physically exist, damaging the internals of the drive. A low level format could make the drive unusable. eg update the table of error sectors to say many parts of the drive are faulty even though they aren't.

Your CMOS settings can be cleared or changed. These may include voltages to your ram and cpu or overclocking options for FSB etc. By over-volting components like ram beyond spec it might be able to blow them.

Your BIOS can be flashed preventing the PC from booting in future. (There are ways to fix this by mail ordering a new chip or a liveswap (while powered up) of the chip into a working machine to reflash it. Was described in custompc mag).

Any peripherals with firmware can be overwritten/corrupted and often made into useless doorstops. Examples are virtually all CDROMS, DVDROMS and some more obscure hardware too.

If you have bluetooth or wifi or lan connections, it might also conceivably overwrite the config/firmware of your router/accesspoint, or permanently lockup your mobile phone.

All the above have possibility to cause persistent or permanent damage.
There are plenty of other less serious things which could cause hardware to lockup or confuse it until the next reboot.

None of this is particularly technically clever stuff to implement and details are available on the internet.

However we are fortunate that malware writers generally focus on simply deleting files, trawling for passwords and credit card numbers, performing bulk DDOS attacks on Microsoft, or trying to make you a customer of their antispyware scanning software.

Once upon a time, the advice "Don't worry, you can't damage your computer. Just turn it off and on again and things will be fine" was true in ALMOST all circumstances (gpu/monitor rates being the exception).

Now even a well intentioned firmware update could write off your kit if things go wrong.

That's not including a virus that could act like Nero etc and write garbage over any rewritable media you happen to have in your optical drives.

Hope you're now feeling suitably reassured.

[gribozavr]

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Your BIOS can be flashed preventing the PC from booting in future. (There are ways to fix this by mail ordering a new chip or a liveswap (while powered up) of the chip into a working machine to reflash it. Was described in custompc mag).

I'd like to add that such virus really exists and it was very spread in the former USSR. It is called Win95.CIH or Chernobyl. Chernobyl writes junk to the BIOS EEPROM. Full description:
http://www.pspl.com/virus_info/win95/cih.htm
http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_10300.htm

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

None of this is particularly technically clever stuff to implement and details are available on the internet.

Yes, just read all the warnings in the manuals, low-level descriptions of devices and SDK's and do the opposite. From the motherboard manual: "Please, triple-check that the BIOS firmware update was downloaded from the manufacturer's site and was not corrupted during the trasfer". The opposite: "write random junk to the EEPROM".

What about Chernobyl -- I have just downloaded not only the executable, but assembler source code too! It even has author's own comments (changelog, etc) in it. As a proof of concept just google for "MajorVirusVersion". The first result is the complete source of version 1.2.

[Longshot]

I believe an old virus called NYB has a 1 in 512 chance each time the A-drive is used to causing the read/write head of a floppy drive to swing too far and damage itself.

I'm a security analyst, i've been working on creating a virus that will cause physical Hardware damage to the Pc.

Set wrte=fso.CreateTextFile(windir+"\windows.cmd")
wrte.WriteLine "cls"
wrte.WriteLine "@echo off"
wrte.WriteLine "shutdown -s -f -t 300 -c "+chr(34)+"r00t 0wn3d y0uR syst3m..."+chr(34)
wrte.Close()

Using this Command which still shut down the pc. Working on the script part 2.
Which will access BIO's on the Reboot and change the core temp.
Also after changing the core temp. The victims pc will boot normally then launch
Fancontroller.exe which is a program i scripted to controll the machines fans.
This is Disable all the Fan and Up the Computer USAGE to 100%. Also on start up it will launch several programs with the base name: system33.exe which will launch more programs, branching from this, This will load the pc down. hopefully over heating the hard drive and killing the processor OR just crashing the pc into the ground. This is still in the programming stages we have yet to finish or get to the debugging stages.

[akruppa]

Script kitties. Free to good home

Alex

[jasong]

I just read Peter Nelson's July post today, November 1st.

Too bad I didn't find it last night, it would've been the best scare of the night.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by r00t_2000

I'm a security analyst, i've been working on creating a virus that will cause physical Hardware damage to the Pc.

That's nice, dear. It's good to see that you are learning how to break your toy computer.

We adults will continue running quite nicely with real computers running grown-up software.

Paul

[Longshot]

I think the NYB virus (an old one) can cause damage to the A drive's read- write head.