Re: Modern hw-killing virus feasible

[Blue Boar <BlueBoar () THIEVCO COM>]

There have been confirmed reports of "walking" disk drives... these
are the dishwasher sized beasts.  One could move the heads about
in such a way to make the drive rock about on it's feet, and
move around the room.

The old Commodore 1541 drives only had about 30-odd tracks, but
the command for what track to send to took a full byte.  It
was trivial to write a short program to send the head to track 255.
This required opening the drive case and pulling the head
back into the normal area.  Of course, these drives could also
be programmed to play music by vibrating a different pitches....
I used to have a program that would play "East Side, West Side"
on the drive.

My BBS program from years ago burned the banner into my monochrome
composite monitor by displaying the same banner for about 3 years
straight... does that count? :)

I've toasted one monitor in my career by supplying the wrong
signal type.  I believe it was an EGA monitor.  Some VGA
monitors could be toasted by prolonged running at the
wrong frequency.  They also scream pretty bad during that
time (if you can hear monitors scream, as I can) so it
would have to go for a couple of hours without supervision
probably to be permanent.  I seriously doubt anyone has
been able to make a monitor main tube actually blow this way..
but they could fry some of the high frequency/high voltage
components for sure.  The last several monitors I have
worked with will report what frequency ranges they
accept on-screen when presented with a frequency out
of range.  I think that means most modern video card/
monitor combinations are safe from software.

On (I think) the Firewall-wizards list, someone recently
claimed they made a localdirector catch fire from the
volume of traffic, and to have pictures.. I don't know I believe
that one.

I've had too much halftracking on old Apple drives throw them
out of alignment... required opening the case, and
adjusting the timing pot to fix.

Obviously any fully programmable, free mobile robot could kill
itself.

Then there are things like CIH.  Don't know if I would call
those dead hardware per se... certainly, they can make life suck,
but technically, it's just killed software that would be
really hard for most people to put back.  I've got flash BIOS,
flash Video BIOS, hard drives with some sort of manufacturer
non-volitile storage (other than the disk itself, I
believe), and who knows what other pieces in there that
can be flashed.

Interestingly, one virus vendor spokesperson recently claimed
that hardware damage was a myth:
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/167

Perhaps he meant that none have happened so far, and
doesn't count CIH.

But, in short, my opinion is that software can cause permanent
(have to replace atoms to fix) damage, under the exact
right circumstances.

                                        BB