Originally posted by Zone-MR@Jun 18 2003, 12:12 PM
4) Remotly *DESTROY* a computer? Don't they mean erase some data? Unless they are talking about some very specific modules with buggy bios chips that can be wiped by software, I don't see anyone coming close to actually destroying a PC remotly.
the only way I can think of that they could easily destroy a machine is this:
most motherboards made in the last few years, that i've used and seen used at least, including a lot of newer oem machines, are able to flash the mobo's bios from windows with an app called winflash. from what i can tell, i'm almost positive it's the same flash routine for all award bioses, and the same routine all ami bioses. they could use a gui less version of that to write 0's to the eeprom, and reboot the machine so that the motherboard never sees the light of day again.
the only problem with that though is they have to get a user to run an exe, just like a virus, and though there will still be the occasional newbie that would run it and send their motherboard, or at least it's bios chip, to the scrap bin, most people that at least have some experience with pc's have had it hammered into their head so much by virtually every company in the pc security market that you shouldn't run an exe unless you know exactly what it's going to do, that they won't run it.
beyond that, completely "destroying" a computer remotely is nearly impossible. without some sort of physical access or remote connection to a machine, they can't. what are they going to do, force microsoft to redesign window's tcp/ip stack so that any specially crafted data sent to a machine that is signed by the RIAA can run any kind of code on the receving machine that it wants? or are they just going to look through the windows source code and find that bug that i believe it was steve ballimer said that NT's message queuing service had during the anti trust trial that if ever found by hackers, it could put every pc running NT in jeopardy of being rooted? i really don't see either of those happening any time soon
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