Originally posted here by Wazz
Theoretically, any piece of hardware with upgradeable firmware can be rendered useless including but not limited to video cards, sound cards, routers, etc. You would most likely need an update/flash utility for the specific device and perhaps an image of the firmware. All you would have to do is hex edit or recompile the image to corrupt it and spawn a shell on the remote box to flash the image. The only way to "repair" the hardware would be to re-flash it with an Eprom burner...if the end user even thinks of that (they may assume the hardware just **** the bed on them). Scary.
If memory serves correctly there was a firmware problem on some brand of CDROM that would totally get ****ed and stop working when trying to install mandrake 9 or 9.1. I imagine that if you could find out what exactly was screwing the cd drives up you could use it to exploit on other machines. (with the same cd drives)