PC guru's

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PC guru's

February 13, 2016, 06:38:20 PM

is it "impossible" for a program to be written and upon execution of the program it renders the laptop or pc as useless and unable to power up afterwards, meaning there is no sign of life of the machine even seeing source power.,, no matter how many times you stab the power button there are no lights nor any signs of input power present?

remember the term above, "impossible"

PC guru's

Reply #1 – February 13, 2016, 10:54:38 PM

Not sure I follow...you're saying the computer stops showing any signs of life when it's; A powered up, or; B when a program loads and starts running?

No blue screen o' death, or BIOS or anything?

What kind of machine and OS? The newer OS's can have a diagnostics ran from Bios and it will tell you what's failing/has failed...

PC guru's

Reply #2 – February 14, 2016, 02:10:11 AM

Sounds like a laptop with no lights or anything.

Lots of laptops have direct power connections soldiered onto the board. Wear and tear loosens them up until you get bad/no connection and one day you have no power.

Test the power brick, make sure its giving appropriate power, if it is, pull the laptop apart and look for any signs of physical damage around the board where the power goes in. Sometimes the power button itself goes bad. These are usually just straight shorts, but now a days everything uses pulses and micro controllers for everything.

PC guru's

Reply #3 – February 14, 2016, 11:51:27 AM

actually I am wondering if its possible.

PC guru's

Reply #4 – February 14, 2016, 12:43:55 PM

You would have to corrupt the BIOS for the motherboard to not even respond to 12, 5, 3.3v inputs (if those are still the rails things may have changed in the last 10 years :hick:)

The worst viruses are usually boot sector/Master Boot Record viruses which will make you get stuck past the POST (Power On Self Test) where the CPU/mem specs and logical drives are shown. Though typically laptops don't show the POST screen.

But if you're hitting the power button and literally NOTHING is changing compared to the state the PC/laptop is in with zero battery/wall power to it...that's not software.

PC guru's

Reply #5 – February 14, 2016, 03:19:05 PM

There are viruses that can re write bios and reflash them.

It should still light up if you plug in a brick and it should still turn on the screen.

PC guru's

Reply #6 – February 15, 2016, 08:57:02 AM

Being in IT for longer than I can remember, I can say anything is possible.

That being said, it would be hard to make a virus that could pull off such a feat universally. An attack like that would probably have to be written for a specific set of hardware, due to the different ways each manufacturer's CMOS handles power management. That alone would make it pretty rare.

Virus writers typically go for OS-level payloads, because they act the same on nearly every host. And anymore, most viruses are written for monetary gains (spam, etc), or drone/cluster type attacks (infecting host PCs and using them to bombard a specific target). I just don't see hardware-killing viruses anymore. But, is it possible to kill a PC? Yes. It is very, VERY unlikely nowadays though. Many modern PCs will stall and pop up a warning from the CMOS when something tries to write to it (see your PCs BIOS virus protection).

I have personally witnessed two CMOS-level attacks. One, wiped the CMOS entirely. This caused the PC to just sit there and beep and grind the floppy drive. I had to order a CMOS flash disk from Tandy to bring it back to life (Yes, Tandy, it was that long ago). This was before the internet, and we caught viruses from promiscuous floppy disks. I still have that virus on a 5.25 disk somewhere in storage.

The second CMOS-level attack inserted itself in the hard drive interface code, and would write junk data to the hard drive destroying it permanently. Any drive attached to that system would be unusable afterward. It wouldn't even ID properly. You know how on the POST it lists your drive models ("Seagate ST9235AG" etc)? Well this would damage even the id! It would still post, but it would just say "!@#%^617" or something. Any floppy inserted would meet the same fate. This was in the mid 90s. I didn't try to fix that one. Hard drives weren't cheap, and after killing like 3 of them I just sped the board.

I haven't seen any decent hardware attacks since. Sorry for the ramble, I don't get to wax vintage IT knowledge very often, lol.

Short answer: Possible, yes. EXTREMELY unlikely though.