RE: DOS all platforms

["Shawn Nunley" <shawn () nunleys com>]

Well, this is no legend.

Back around 1995 (I think) I was issued a brand new IBM ThinkPad 701C.
These were pretty cool systems, but it turned it out could be utterly
destroyed by a simple virus.  The Win/CIH virus wasn't so bad on most
machines, but somehow this laptop managed to have its entire brains
obliterated (BIOS) by the virus, including the code that enabled you to
write *new* BIOS.  So, the only remedy was to have an entirely new system
board installed.

IBM actually did fix this under warranty, on site.  I'm guessing they did
this because the design was fundamentally flawed in that for the first time,
all of the BIOS (all of it) was read/write.  In any case, this is a case of
a virus destroying hardware.  The system board had to have it's BIOS chips
de-soldered and reinstalled,

Here's a news account.

http://www.internetwk.com/news/news0721-4.htm


Shawn Nunley, CISSP

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah [mailto:rslade () sprint ca]

Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 10:31 PM
To: Brent Colflesh; full-disclosure () lists netsys com
Subject: RE: [Full-disclosure] DOS all platforms

Ah, dear, dear, dear.  The old legends never really die ...

> Exibar wrote:
>
> >   Causing Physical damage to equipment????  Good luck....  although way
> back
> > when there was a program that would set the refresh rate on your monitor
> > very very high and it could cause the monitor to die....  Doesn't happen
> > anymore though :-)

Good luck about covers it.  The monitor business was not the refresh rate,
but the 
scanning rate.  On one particular graphics card (one of the Hercules line,
if my 
failing memory serves) /monitor combo you could set the rate to zero in both

directions, thus allowing you to burn out the phosphors in one particular
spot.  It 
would take some considerable time to seriously damage a large chuck of
screen real 
estate.  Never was included in any malware that I encountered ...

From:                   "Brent Colflesh" <Brent.Colflesh () ulticom com>
Date sent:              Fri, 23 Jan 2004 18:00:09 -0500

> I also recall rumours of a virus in the ~1995 time frame which would
> cause overexcursion of the r/w heads in the hard drive, causing the
> heads to crash into the side of the drive.

Again, never used in any malware.  This was widely used as an example of an 
action that *could* cause hardware damage.  In fact, it was hardly
universal.  Some 
old 5.25" drives would lose alignment if the heads were repeatedly banged
against 
the stop.  On the other hand, on some drives it was the standard way to get
the 
drive to allow you to access and format tracks outside the normal range, so
that 
you could cram more data onto a disk ...

====================== 
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