Ah, dear, dear, dear. The old legends never really die ... > Exibar wrote: > > > Causing Physical damage to equipment???? Good luck.... although way > back > > when there was a program that would set the refresh rate on your monitor > > very very high and it could cause the monitor to die.... Doesn't happen > > anymore though :-)
Good luck about covers it. The monitor business was not the refresh rate, but the scanning rate. On one particular graphics card (one of the Hercules line, if my failing memory serves) /monitor combo you could set the rate to zero in both directions, thus allowing you to burn out the phosphors in one particular spot. It would take some considerable time to seriously damage a large chuck of screen real estate. Never was included in any malware that I encountered ... From: "Brent Colflesh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date sent: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 18:00:09 -0500 > I also recall rumours of a virus in the ~1995 time frame which would > cause overexcursion of the r/w heads in the hard drive, causing the > heads to crash into the side of the drive. Again, never used in any malware. This was widely used as an example of an action that *could* cause hardware damage. In fact, it was hardly universal. Some old 5.25" drives would lose alignment if the heads were repeatedly banged against the stop. On the other hand, on some drives it was the standard way to get the drive to allow you to access and format tracks outside the normal range, so that you could cram more data onto a disk ... ====================== [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] "If you do buy a computer, don't turn it on." - Richards' 2nd Law "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 "Viruses Revealed" 0-07-213090-3 "Software Forensics" 0-07-142804-6 ============= for back issues: [Base URL] site http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/ alternate site http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade/ CISSP refs: [Base URL]mnbksccd.htm PC Security: [Base URL]mnvrrvsc.htm Security Dict.: [Base URL]secgloss.htm Security Educ.: [Base URL]comseced.htm Book reviews: [Base URL]mnbk.htm [Base URL]review.htm Partial/recent: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/techbooks/ Security Educ.: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/comseced/ Review mailing list: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
