Can you harm 'hardware' remotely?

[valhallen]

on older harddrives there was a virus which caused the head to attempt to read from a sector which wasn't thee - so it simply slammed the read head of the HD against the casing ruining the HD.....am not to sure of the details of it tho.

But I do know that all modern HD's come with protection against this so those types of virii are useless now - thank goodness

v_Ln

[homenet]

yea kr4y3 you are right, On a number of LG cd drives, mandrake 9.2 would cause the CD drives to pack up. It was something to do with the FLUSH CACHE command, i remeber it cause i`ve got a LG rewriter but luckly mines unaffected.

[therenegade]

lol,I did it once when I was coding something in C(that prolly tells ya how lousy I code)...messing with a few pointers and my CPu overclocked...I had to replace my motherboard...

[MURACU]

I seem to remember way back when .... ,gone all misty eyed, there use be ways to send the park command to a hard drive while it was working. If i remember correctly this had the effect of "parking" the drive head in the middle of the disk. It is no longer possiable today. I think the only real recent case of a virus which damaged hardware was the chernoble virus. i could be wrong as i haven't check out any links before i wrote this. To damage a computer phsically today takes, in most cases, some fairly serious low level programming and in depth knowledge of the system you are attacking.

[berg]

I remember back in the 80's there was a virus that altered the scan rate of an IBM PC monitor's electronic beam, and the monitor would burst into flames... i read about it in an older computer security book.


berg

[saintakaagni]

there is a software in hackology network which can destroy a harddisk
http://www.hackology.com/programs/hdkp/ginfo.shtml

[Info Tech Geek]

I would think there could be a chance that something could easily be overclocked beyond recommended remotely and after time the hardware could start malfunctioning.

[homenet]

yea that program was not designed for that purpose, it was designed to securly wipe all data from the hard disk, as a by product of that it has been reported to physically damage some hard disk`s.
I`m not trying to moan at you saintakaagni but its prob not best to link directly to things like that, we all know the mentality of some of the users on here, luckly they dont tend to be around for long.

[valhallen]

saintakaagni HDK (hard drive killer) does not destroy HD's it erases all data but on some older HD's it can cause corruption making it unusable - am not sure how it works as have never really read up on it but i do remember that it _may_ leave some HD's dead - not _def_ will

v_Ln

[adiz]

There are a few ways a person can screw someone's harddrive. I would think that the first and easiesy way (non-remotely) like gore said the A: drive bomb....If you wanna know how to make one for your own info and not to harm others computers you can contact me off of AO.

Other ways to remotely harm the hard ware would be to delete drivers.
reset the bios

I was also thinking you can change you fan speed or overload the processor immensly to burn it out.

The refresh rate GORE talked about.

I am googling to see about frying the motherboard. My brother told me about it and said it was possible so I am going to check around.

{edit} Alright, here is a link - How to burn out a Motherboard
This is kinda the idea I had. You would first have to make sure no programs are running to alert the pc the fan went out. You then turn the fan off. After that you overload the PC to were it gets very very hot. Least thing that can happen would be crashing the computer.

This article also give a pretty good list of operating temperatures for the processors.

[Sorry for misspellings]

Adiz