Can malware damage hardware?

Is it possible to create a Stuxnet-like malware that could physically damage a common PC in any way? Has it been done?

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R u dumb?

If you get kernel access, sure. But the severity is very limited. If you get firmware access to a microcontroller, well then the sky is the limit.

Yes, but there's no money in it.

Yes.

There have been some stuff that got into the firmware of harddrives bricking them.

supposedly back in the CRT days there was a virus that forced a higher refresh rate on them essentially preventing a video output even in safe mode, and in some cases burning out non-heatsink video cards

>run CPU at 100% for weeks
>read and write a massive file over and over
etc

CIH from the 90s which cooked BIOSes, from /ourguy/ danooct1: youtube.com/watch?v=RrnWFAx5vJg
Other than that not that I've heard of, and even then CIH is a stretch since it's not actual physical damage like a power delivery component going beyond whatever it's capable of.

Thermal throttling will prevent any damage at that level.

Let's not consider erasing firmware a "physical" damage.

#!/bin/sh
rm -rf /sys/firmware/efi/efivars

> :^)

This is why we can't have nice things

>he keeps thermal throttling on
I live on the edge

>implying permanent denial of service can't be valuable
Just watch some do this to every server and work computer at a company they dislike and then short the stock.

sounds like an easy trace for the FTC

Probably, but someone has to be dumb enough to try.
Other potential things would be to weaponize such malware by crime syndicates. They do it to one company to "prove" its effectiveness, and by virtue of destroying data it becomes very difficult to figure out what exploits they used. They then could extort other companies, saying they will do the same if they don't pay up.

I got some bad viruses when I younger, but my older bro helped me out XD.
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>run CPU at 100% for weeks
>read and write a massive file over and over
>etc
a lot like windows 10 does by default...
really makes you think.

if they have access to firmware there is far worse they can do than simple erasing instruction sets.

also causing things to overheat while negative force shutdowns causes smoking and sometimes fires.
these fumes release hazardous gasses.

That's targeted though. If you're targeting there's money in anything.
Targeting is also a lot harder and less profitable than just releasing ransomware that installs itself through a zero-day through an ad

Bios rewrite was easy back in msdos and 9x days. Not really now.

Probably easiest now would be to write a lot to the drive. Will wear hdds and reduce speed of ssds particularly fast.

Probably wouldn't be too hard to blow a few older graphics cards by pushing them full throttle for a week.

Only other thing i can think of would be opening and closing the cd tray repetitively. That would be much more noticeable by the user though.

I would assume malware drivers (which can run in kernel) could affect more things. Especially things like plcs and embedded devices, which have more "real world" affects.

There's several ways to damage a PC, some are boring and most no longer work because somebody proved that it did once and manufacturers fixed their shit.

I don't recall which was first but there first two known hardware damaging attacks were:
> Driver code that rotated a hard-drive platter 180 and then back again 180 the other direction in a loop. Doing this fast enough eventually shook the whole PC apart and caused the destruction of the PC through flexing of the motherboard with associated short-circuits etc. Screws and shit were coming loose anyway so something somewhere was going to go, the hard drive itself survived but if it went long enough would probably have shaken itself apart eventually. The shorting from the flexing motherboard could probably cause a fire with a bit of bad luck.
> A brand of early CRT monitors could be destroyed through specially crafted display data that caused the CRT gun to do something retarded that fried itself. A fairly boring death but the monitor was inoperable afterwards and needed at least a replacement gun.

Later, components moved to having firmware and the firmware nearly always prevented malicious or retarded drivers from sabotaging the hardware but the price was that firmware requires updates and once those updates got easy enough, firmware can brick the component. That still exists obviously, most PC components can be bricked these days. Boring but technically repairable damage.

During the era of early overclocking, CPUs could be fried by poor cooling. I destroyed a couple of CPUs by fucking up some water cooling where the pump didn't get up to speed quickly enough and the CPU overheated about three seconds after power-on. In those days, you needed to turn the water cooling on separately to the PC so that it had time to start working before the CPU got too hot.

Since fans are sometimes under OS control, even in those days, a malicious/hacked fan driver could probably fry a CPU.

more info on your examples please

If nvidia can fry your card with a driver, then it's certainly possible for malware to do the same with other hardware.
>engadget.com/2010/03/05/nvidia-pulls-196-75-driver-amid-reports-its-frying-graphics-car/

Their is a bypass of Intel management system

AMD can do this too
>community.amd.com/thread/192370

explain user

You can rewrite firmware with garbage, but there's no unified firmware update mechanism, so the malware has to target specific hardware.
You can overclock components, but again, there's no unified overclocking mechanism (plus, you're counting on inadequate overload protection), so it has to be a targeted hack.
A few components can be bricked with incorrect configuration (e.g. is known to brick some mainboards).
You can cause excessive wear by spinning up fans, moving read-write heads or bombarding Flash memory with junk writes, but once again, it's only applicable to specific hardware.

All in all, if you're making malware to attack a very specific target with a known range of hardware configurations, it's possible, but it won't work for mass infection.

Targeted attack like Iranian centrifuges.

ayy lmao

there use to be malware that would write itself to a bios, and every time you got rid of it would come back because it was still on the bios.

a few that would embed themselves in firmwares

Turning the fan off isnt to hard and that use to kill cpus, same with gpus till much more recently

there was one a long time ago that would just seal the outermost part of a hdd platter then the innermost part of it, and it would do that till the hdd no longer worked, but here is the thing, wouldn't hit the edges like a click of death does, and its not those small rapid movements you normally hear, it's just long term wear and tear happening.

Then you have ones that write a brick of data, then endlessly re copy it, see they don't do an entire ssd, as you would notice if your boot runs out of space, but if they rewrite a 1-10gb chunk over and over they kill the drive while you may not even notice it till its gone.

>Driver code that rotated a hard-drive platter 180 and then back again 180 the other direction in a loop.
That's clearly bullshit. Hard drive motor has no way near enough power to shake anything, especially older ones that took forever even to spin up normally, nor it is possible to control the rotation direction through the driver.

I do vaguely remember hearing an anecdotal story though about virus moving either hard drive's or nearby floppy drive's heads back and forth at the right frequency making the hard drive's heads go into resonance and crash.

Power viruses have that potential

>I do vaguely remember hearing an anecdotal story though about virus moving either hard drive's or nearby floppy drive's heads back and forth at the right frequency making the hard drive's heads go into resonance and crash.
I don't know about that, but supposedly it's possible for a virus to physically destroy a floppy disk drive. I can't remember the details since I read about it in a 1990s computer magazine back in the day.

The rules disallow avatars and signatures, but you don't seem to have an idea what that actually means.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

...

set fan speed to 0%

>it's possible for a virus to physically destroy a floppy disk drive.


not really a big deal mate, just write/delete the same file over and over gain for like half an hour, floppy disks had shit endurance and lifespan.

That is the stupidest single use of any similar software that is that advanced.

>Achieve superior botnet
>Break it

Explain yourself

MEMES
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>At the dawn of the PC era, the late 20th century, users frequently spread scary stories that happened “to one of good friends of theirs,” from a virus. In such stories, viruses, for instance, fed some ‘wrong’ interlacing to a CRT monitor and ‘burned out’ the PC’s hardware components. In other tales, malware made HDD plates ‘resonate’ fiercely, ultimately destroying hard drives. Or overclocked a floppy drive to cause an imminently deadly rotor overheat

blog.kaspersky.com/fact-or-fiction-virus-damaging-hardware/9705/

Yes, it's possible create something that overheats/overclocks something like a GPU and disables the fan

>malware that could physically damage a common PC

Once again we see that loonix is shit.

>flashing a wrong bios image from windows can brick your computer

B-but it was supposed to just werk