Internet Coding/Virus Question

assuming your seriously asking, you cant install a virus in a message board. if they guy even was capable do you think he would advertise it? ive heard of viruses that over clock your comp but i doubt it would cause damage. just instability.

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Hi guys. I knew very little professionaly wise about computers. Im basically a kid 15 years old who is a decent problem solver. I dont know any computer languages. Thats just a summary of me. But anyways. I speak from experience. about 2 and ah alf years ago I ran no antivirus program or firewall. I believe I had a melissa virus and one other extremely harmful virus. It fried my CPU and DESTROYED my motherboard. Im not sure how but I had to replace both. That was after I reformated many times and a couple of different ways. Each time it stayed on my hard drive. Even when it wasnt detected. But I'll tell you it is very possible for an experienced cracker to set the kernel file to run a bit faster on your cpu each time. Eventually damaging your hardsware without much visual symptoms. But when people do talk about "code red" virus's ignore them because they are probably just trying to sound cool and get attention.

mellisa was a dos attack (denial of service) if i remember correctly. code red was similar. neither of them could destroy hardware. if you had a virus on your system after a format either it was on your install disks, or it was a boot sector virus.

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Interesting discussion.

jihiggs, or anybody else: would it be possible to have a virus flashed into your BIOS Flash? I mean, I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be possible, but I've never heard of any positively identified cases of this happenning. If it were possible it would explain how a virus could stay with a system even after all the hard disk information is erased.

just curious.

I beleive that if a virus is stored in your boot sector it can stay there even after a reformat, because the reformat does not entirly clears the boot sector.

However, if you do a low level format (reset to zeros or ones) then no virus should survive.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies

I have read that there were several Bios virii, but that none of them actually worked, this was back in the early 90's I think.
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edit: I did a search and did find a bios virus, it is the Win95/CIH. It is low risk, and in order for it to work you have to have one of the motherboard bios's it was written for. Overall, doesn't seem too damaging, but a little.
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There could be a greater possibility of a bios being infected now, with the improved bios flash utilities that can run from windows, but I still don't know of any.

As far as a boot sector virus, I usually do my formats using the ranish partition manager, and if I ever see the MBR as an unknown IPL I change it back to standard IPL (I assume it is similar to "fdisk /mbr)

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Bardic on 05/29/03 01:18 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

Interestigly enough I just came across a BIOS virus at work. IT was specifically written for a particular motherboard (One of the new fast intel's, but I can't remember which...). It was not a public one, but written as proof of concept on a bet between some programmers. IIRC it was all assembly, and didn't do much harm, but it was interesting none the less.

Dev

Poor windows was not a brave soul. Threatened by the force of General Protection and Major Problem the little OS committed suicide by hanging.