lexw@idca.tds.philips.nl (Lex Wassenberg) (09/12/90)
Can anybody inform me whether there are virusses that can actually damage
the hardware of a system? If so, what is the damage, and how is it done?
Which virusses do so?
Related question:
I seem to remember that someone posted an article quite some time ago,
which described the "12 tricks" Trojan Horse quite extensively. My memory
keeps telling me that one of these tricks damaged the hard disk. The article
also described the other 11 tricks. Unfortunately, I didn't save it at
the time. So, if anybody has this article, can you mail it to me?
(or maybe repost it, if the moderator allows it).
Thanks everyone.
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/ U | Lex Wassenberg, Philips TDS, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands
/__ < lexw@idca.tds.philips.nl
88 |_\ "Since nobody understands me, I speak only for myself."WHMurray@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL (09/16/90)
>lex at idca.tds.philips.nl (Lex Wassenberg) writes: > >Can anybody inform me whether there are virusses that can actually damage >the hardware of a system? If so, what is the damage, and how is it done? >Which virusses do so? This question has been answered before, but since it is arising again, it may be timely to repeat the answer. A virus is a special case of a computer program. It can do anything that any other computer program can do. While it must manifest some characteristic special behavior to qualify as a virus, it cannot do anything that any other program cannot do. Thus, if your hardware can be programmed to damage itself, or will damage itself in response to programmable behavior, then a virus can damage it. Of course, most hardware designers attempt to avoid this. They try to design the hardware such that it will not permanently damage itself in response to programmed instructions. In general they are successful. There have been a limited number of failures. For example, the original IBM Monochrome Adapter Card permitted you to program the horizontal sweep rate. If you set it to zero, and left it in that state for a long period, you could burn out the monitor. [There is a related problem of computer viruses that do things which make the hardware temporarily unresponsive. For example, some viruses have been reported to damage the harddisk partition table. While this does not do permanent damage, it may appear to have done damage to the hardware.] There has been a great deal of speculation about viruses containing such hardware damaging code, but no successful ones have been reported. Note that success of such a virus would not be demonstrated by its ability to do such damage, but its success in both doing such damage and also successfully replicating. (I think that I am right in saying that there are no successful biological viruses which are universally fatal, at least not if they require their host for replication and spreading.) William Hugh Murray, Executive Consultant, Information System Security 21 Locust Avenue, Suite 2D, New Canaan, Connecticut 06840 203 966 4769, WHMurray at DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL