Can A Virus Crash Your Motherboard?
The other day I reminded myself how fragile computer systems are when I accidentally crashed my motherboard. I wasn't trying to write a virus -- but it had the same effect -- when I was testing a new version of firmware for a virtual server used for dedicated storage processing.
The errant firmware, residing in a host bus adapter card, manged to step on the BIOS which caused the Linux Kernel to panic. Fortunately, the Kernel was compiled with debug enabled and I was able to figure out what was going on.
After debugging the self-induced virus, the server would not boot or anything. It took a physical reset of the BIOS by removing the battery and reprogramming it.
The good news for you, is that even if a virus writer attempts to overwrite PCI registers, the operating system requires that you need to be in a supervisory mode before accessing these memory mapped regions. That is, it is not likely that a virus will crash your motherboard; however, it can crash your operating system.
The errant firmware, residing in a host bus adapter card, manged to step on the BIOS which caused the Linux Kernel to panic. Fortunately, the Kernel was compiled with debug enabled and I was able to figure out what was going on.
After debugging the self-induced virus, the server would not boot or anything. It took a physical reset of the BIOS by removing the battery and reprogramming it.
The good news for you, is that even if a virus writer attempts to overwrite PCI registers, the operating system requires that you need to be in a supervisory mode before accessing these memory mapped regions. That is, it is not likely that a virus will crash your motherboard; however, it can crash your operating system.
posted by Howard at
5:51 AM
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