20 Mar
1999
20 Mar
'99
9:18 p.m.
If the ART chips that drive the serial ports are gone, they won't work no
matter what it used to access them.
--
-Jason Willgruber
(roblwill(a)usaor.net)
ICQ#: 1730318
<http://members.tripod.com/general_1>
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-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Smith <eric(a)brouhaha.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, March 19, 1999 10:25 PM
Subject: Re: Security question (sort of)
Jason wrote:
programmer,
A virus planted by a hacker can damage hardware
by "eating" at the chips,
I'm not a virus expert, but I am an experienced embedded systems and have done some hardware design. That said, this
claim sounds
completely
ridiculous to me, on par with an urban legend. Care to
explain this from a
electronics (or physics, or chemistry) point of view?
trash
or just scrambling the code in the chip.
In a flash BIOS, maybe, although that would be tend to be specific to a
certain motherboard. There's no general way to write a virus that can the BIOS on any arbitrary motherboard, because unlike
much of the
"PC standard", there is not a stanard for how the flash BIOS programming
works. Different motherboards use different types of flash chips that
have different programming requirements.
I've never yet heard of a virus doing this, although I'll concede that it
is
possible. Decent motherboards require you to
physically move a jumper in
order to enable programming the BIOS, to prevent exactly this kind of
problem.
However, changing the BIOS such that the machine still booted but simply
didn't have INT 13 serial support wouldn't prevent all software from
using the serial port. Most software these days doesn't even bother to
go through the BIOS to access the ports, because (1) the BIOS interface
is incredibly lame, and (2) on some machines the BIOS functions don't even
work correctly.
microcontroller,
(I know someone (Ironically, it's the sister
of the person that did this
to my computer), who's keyboard controller chip got scrambled.
Sounds like a complete coincidence to me. Except for exotic (and fairly
expensive) keyboards, the firmware is in masked ROM inside a and there is no way to modify it without physically
replacing the chip.
Eric