Can a Virus Destroy Hardware?

[afzan]

Originally posted by: Carp1812

Originally posted by: Stealth1024
there was a virus that claimed to be able to physically destroy a hard drive..

I remember this as well- I think that it forced the drive to spin at speeds well above its rated speed. This would either cause the mechanism to shatter or got so hot that it would start to melt.

you can't change the rotational speed of a hard disk through software

 

[charlie21]

No disrespect meant towards your brother's friend, as long as you're sure he's trustworthy. There's just no way that a virus could BBQ your ENTIRE system. In fact, the only possible way that I could think of this happening is if the virus jacked all of the voltages and frequencies in the BIOS to the max settings. If that is possible, that would nuke some hardware. But since every mobo's BIOS is different, that would have to be a very model specific virus. Just not plausible.

Anyway, more details please, I want to hear how this turns out.

 

[Bleep]

Textyou can't change the rotational speed of a hard disk through software

Maybe he is a old guy like me and remember that in the days of the Commodore 64/128 there was some copy protection on some games that did this.

Bleep

 

[Amorphus]

however, if the computer did restart several hundred/thousand times in a short amount of time, then the fluctuating voltage lines most likely could've done some damage...

12v 0v 12v 0v, in a continuous cycle... supplied to EVERYTHING in the computer....

:Q

 

[Idoxash]

Oh you bet it will freakt hat pc up if the psu was restarted 100 times continuously infact you only have to do that for a few times to get the affect.

--Idoxash

PS)have your friend to get all his hardware and check it in another pc just incase this guy is after the hardware! You never know to you try it!

 

[Regs]

No.

 

[John P]

PS)have your friend to get all his hardware and check it in another pc just incase this guy is after the hardware! You never know to you try it!

He did mention that he tried some of the components in another machine. Like I said though, I am not sure of the details. Stay tuned...

 

[Red Dawn]

I've never seen a Virus destroy any hardware in the time I've been working on Computers which is 10 years.

 

[Zepper]

Chernobyl could wipe the BIOS and erase or overwrite important parts of the hard disk (worked on several of those), but any
decent AV proggie updated in the last 3 years or so should be able to catch that.
.bh.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Chernobyl could wipe the BIOS and erase or overwrite important parts of the hard disk (worked on several of those), but any
decent AV proggie updated in the last 3 years or so should be able to catch that.
.bh.

And it only affects Win95/98. Plus with new counter measures from mobo manufactures. Like a jumper to enable programmable or writable code to the bios.

 

[John P]

OK, got an update. As we all thought all the virus has seemed to do is corrupt some data on the hard drive. The rest of the hardware is fine.

Oh well, if nothing else it brought up an interesting discussion....

 

[BFG10K]

A virus cannot physically destroy hardware. However it can certainly modify BIOS/firmware, making the hardware unusable.

 

[CQuinn]

Originally posted by: Carp1812

Originally posted by: Stealth1024
there was a virus that claimed to be able to physically destroy a hard drive..

I remember this as well- I think that it forced the drive to spin at speeds well above its rated speed. This would either cause the mechanism to shatter or got so hot that it would start to melt.

That is untrue... There is no software in the world that can force a drive to run "above its rated speed", since the
motor for the drive is not controlled by software.

(IIRC) There was rumored to be a virus (waaay back in the day) that could continually request a drive mechanism to
repark the drive heads several times a second. This had the potential to wear out the mechanism over time, assuming
there was no one around to just shut the computer off when it would start flaking out...
(This was also back in the day when most people would turn their computers off when they were not in use).

Could a Virus cause a computer to reboot itself several hundred times within a few seconds?

No, that is quite physically impossible. (IMO)
1. The power supply and motherboard cannot switch power that fast. (The BIOS test alone would take
longer than a second to come up).

2. Even if the virus could send a command to get the computer to reboot - it would only work once. Rebooting
would flush the virus from memory. Even if the virus infected the system at the boot level, it would still have to
wait for the OS to start loading to start the reboot process again. And with Blaster in the news recently causing
that very effect on Windows systems, you can be sure we would have heard reports of some virus that could
cause rapid-fire reboots.

3. Even looking beyond that, the virus would still need to send the command thru the CPU to the rest of the
system to force a reboot. How could the CPU process any commands if it is also going thru power loss several
hundred times a second?

(Note: I'm not saying that a current could not be rapidly switched going into the system, just that it is not
something that could be done thru a virus or trojan horse. AFAIK.)

How did my brother's friend know that had happened?

He doesn't. He's pulling an explanation that sounds good to a layman, but should get called for shenanigans
by anyone half-competent in these forums.

Could that have caused some sort of short out in the hardware?

Not on a modern system. It was because of viruses like Chernobyl that hardware was better designed to
not be vulnerable to invalid system requests that could abuse standard hardware functions or rewrite firmware.

I would have guessed the power supply caused the problems also - if he hadn't got the NAV Virus alerts right before it happened.

You may be assuming things the wrong way around. If the power supply was flaking out and causing problems for
the system, then the effect on reading and writing files might look like virus activity to a monitoring program like
NAV. Your brother did not say what the warning alert he got from the antivirus program actually said.
A bad power supply could be frying his system beforehand, and the last gasp of the system would have been
NAV saying "I think something is wrong here...".

Was your brother running with a UPS by any chance? Not just a surge protector, but something that could
respond to brownouts as well as spikes in the house current?

Please abstain from calling my bro's friend an idiot/schmuck/whatever. He is trouble shooting his system for free,
better than being raped at some computer shop.

Unless he knows somethings that I have not picked up in the past few years of troubleshooting PCs, then he is giving
patently false information that, free or not, may be doing more harm than good in helping your brother recover his
system and figure out what went wrong. (at the very least, it is misleading your brother about the cause of his
problems, even if he means well).

He claims the power supply still works, but isn't that the first thing you might expect to show damage from having
to switch power that rapidly?

Please do find out more details and the name of the virus his friend is claiming behind this.

 

[snidy1]

No, they can't destroy hardware.

 

[bobbyjosh]

Ah but they can. I virus doesn't have to be what you guys are thinking it to be. A virus is any unwanted code meant to cause harm/annoyance upon the user/computer. There is code out there designed to overclock radeon graphics processors: Rage 3d tweak found at rage3d.com . If someone wrote code meant to install this software on every radeon machine with out notice then harm could come from that just by overclocking too much. Intel application accelerator is meant to allow the user to choose how fast or slow the hard drives work. Someone taking advantage of that code I'm sure could find a way to take a hard drive's rpms to it's max. So much of the way a computer performs is held with in drivers. Simply change the way they work and you could change a big way a computer performs... and that could be taken as far as damaging a computer's hardware.

 

[dkozloski]

All the wishing, rationalizing, and symanticizing in the world is not going to make your hard drive change speeds. Hard drive rotational speed is controlled by non programmable hardware. All you can do is turn it on and off. You can change programming on the drive that controlls how drive commands are handled, seeks performed and caching functions sequenced as well as other drive functions. In anything other than the oldest drives, this information is stored in flash memory and/or EEPROMS which can have a finite number of changes before it degrades. Conceivably some dummy could sit and watch a virus-like routine wear out his EEPROM or degrade his flash memory but he would have to be as dumb as a box of rocks not to suspect something odd was happening.