hardware attacking virii

[geepod]

just a quickie to find out the term given to a virus etc that can attack your hardware by changing the voltage and core temp of your cpu etc. is it cih ? I remember reading about these type but cant remember the term and are there any well known onesfloating about etc at the moment.

[huntx7]

I believe thats posssible. The AIDS hoax dextroyed hardware.

[cwk9]

I would think that virus that damage hardware would be rare considering that most mother boards wouldn’t let your change voltage and front side bus settings by software. The only way to change those settings is in the bios which can only be accessed before any software is loaded. I have herd of viruses that are capable of flashing the bios on certain motherboards but as long as you keep bios flashing disabled you should be fine. Some mother boards now come with 2 bioses just in case of a virus or bad flash. Another reason that such virus might be rare is because they would be a lot harder to program than your typical “send a million copies through outlook and format c:” virus

[geepod]

i was under the impression that most of the decent or should i say well written virii are written in assembler therefore being able to attack the hardware directly ? and i think that the article i read although i cant remember when or where stated that these type of virii did attack the bios therefore being able to change your bios settings which obviously can affect your hardware. interesting topic though i find as these could be pretty lethal and certainly change the face of computer security in teerms of virii damage.

[Leviatan]

A virus could damage hardware by messing around with the video/display settings, just like a newbie installing xwindows on his laptop with OpenBSD and makes wrong settings in his xconfig file.

[cwk9]

I guess you could make a virus that puts your hard drive into sleep mode the fires it up again. Do that a few 100 time and it will result in some serious were and tear on your HDD.

[Tuskin]

I know there is assembly out there to turn off the cooling fan for labtops so if you have it set up on power you could just run that code and it'd keep the fan running all the time and use more energy.... or you could do the opposite and turn it off and keep it off... that would be really bad on a lab top. I figure that it should be possible to do that for regular PCs but the code when we were looking for it was specific by the model so it might be too specific to run in a virus. Just a few thoughts

[RuffRyder]

thanks guys

[Und3ertak3r]

From my limited experience..

Software can write directly to the BIOS.. First there are ways to change basic settings in the BIOS from Windoze (as I am sure the same is possable in *nix).
After cleaning system of several of the common virus and trojans I have taken to resetting the BIOS because of "unusual" settings, I don't mean I am to lazy to reset the values, but changes that you can't access from the normal setup prog.
You only need to corrupt the one byte in the BIOS Firmware and you have a very sick and possably dead MoBo. ANd I have had them..

Oh wasn't there a wash.day virus... put ya HDD in the spin cycle of death..


Cheers