RE: Possible new virus?

["David Gillett" <gillettdavid () fhda edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Berry [mailto:compjma () hotmail com]
>
> > From: "David Gillett" <gillettdavid () fhda edu>
> >   Chris, please stop and think for just a moment!!!
>
> I don't have a threaded email reader so cut me a little slack.  (I'm
working
> on setting up a qmail system, but right now I'm stuck with hotmail)  I've
> gone back and re-read the original message in the archives.

  Consider it cut.  Mine's not threaded either, but I seemed to be seeing
several messages in a row from you that were all leaping ahead to assume
that
the fans really had stopped.  I don't know that they haven't, but the people
you were disagreeing with had NOT made that leap yet.
  I wanted to head off premature and pointless argument.  I apologize if
I opted for a little too blunt in the process.

> ..., but yeah, we need to know if the fan is really not working.
> Honestly though, if his motherboard is screaming at him, I'd be highly
> surprised if it was.  Though I suppose you might be able to write a virus
> that accessed the speaker, I think that would still fit in the available
> space.

  Producing a tone from the speaker in real-mode is only about a dozen lines
of assembler.  Making it stop after N seconds is slightly more complicated,
but yeah, space is not really a problem.


> >   (I seem to recall a family of viruses that attempted to re-flash
> > the BIOS.  Machines that were supposed to have different BIOS versions
> > might not, after attack by such a virus....)
>
> Now that would be nasty, don't you usually have to set a jumper or
something
> before doing that or do the new ones let you do it from software?  I
haven't
> bothered to upgrade a BIOS since about 1995, just not worth it with prices
> the way the are now.

  Nope.  You often still have to boot from a DOS floppy with the new
BIOS and a flash-writing utility, but a boot sector virus gets that
kind of hardware access too.  I think the last time I had to touch
the motherboard to install a new BIOS was about 1998 -- the new version
wouldn't fit in the flash chip installed on older revs of a board we
were using a lot of, and needed to be swapped for a larger capacity
chip.  No jumper.

David Gillett



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