DEFMTH2.CVP 911215 Hardware damage The myth of viral programs damaging hardware seems to be one of the more enduring. *No viral program yet found has been designed to damage hardware, and THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY CONFIRMED CASE OF A VIRAL PROGRAM DIRECTLY CAUSING PHYSICAL DAMAGE TO COMPUTER HARDWARE.* Is that plain enough? It *is* possible for certain pieces of hardware to be damaged by software or programming. To the best knowledge of the international virus research community, no such programming (with the exception of low level formatting, see below) has ever been found on an existing virus "in the wild." Monitors - certain older types of monitors (notably early IBM mono graphics adapters) could be made to "freeze" the sweep of the electron beam, and thus "burn in" a section of the screen phosphors. No one has ever burned a hole in a monitor, nor have they ever caused one to overheat and "blow up" with software. Power supplies - cannot be addressed by software. No one has ever "melted down" a power supply with software. Printers - as with any physical device can be damaged by getting them to do any one thing for too long. This, of course, depends upon the machine running unattended for a long time. Drives - some drives can be damaged by "pushing" the heads beyond normal limits. On others, this is a good way to find more disk space. Certain drives can be damaged by having the heads "seek" back and forth at a resonant frequency. (Usually older drives, for mainframes, are more susceptible to this. There is also a story, likely apocryphal, that one computer company set up a "portable" computer, including banks of disk drives, in a semi-trailer for demos. The first time the truck took a turn with all the drives running, it flipped over due to the enormous stored angular momentum of the spinning platters.) IDE controllers and drives do not allow for the normal calls to low level format the drive. If such a call is made, the results are uncertain. The drive will not be formatted, but it will not be left in a usable state. IDE drive manufacturers have not, in the past, shipped programs for low level formatting, and so a call for a low level format on an IDE drive has been, to the normal user, no different than hardware damage. As this has become known in the user community, more IDE manufacturers have been shipping the formatting programs. Hardware damage by software is possible, but extremely rare. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1991 DEFMTH2.CVP 911215 ============== ______________________ Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca | | /\ | | swiped Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | | __ | | __ | | from Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | | \ \ / / | | Mike User p1@CyberStore.ca | | /________\ | | Church Security Canada V7K 2G6 |____|_____][_____|____| @sfu.ca