Hardware Virus

marleyboy

Can anyone tell me if it is possible for a virus to infect the Bios settings of a pc. I ask this because a while ago I had 3 seperate computers both failing with the same problem. Basically they lost the HD's within a week of one another, on inspecting the Bios, I discovered the HD settings had been changed, I did re-issue the original settings for each, but this involved a full format of each HD.

I know that its pretty impossible for a virus to destroy any hardware, but can a virus permeate the BIOS or CMOS to affect the hardware settings of a pc?

ollyk

yes of course if we can flash our bios why can't a bit of code do the same thing? I have never heard of such a case tho. I would be more inclined to think it was something else such as sabatage tho..

albertross_2

maybe the cmos battery died?

marleyboy

on one I might assume so, but 3 machines? There was a flood of work colleagues who all reported similar problems at the time, I thought that it may have installed itself in the giuse of a Microsoft Auto Update. To this day I have never worked out what it was, but it renamed the HD's and altered the settings on each pc

GreenNotM

marleyboy wrote:

Can anyone tell me if it is possible for a virus to infect the Bios settings of a pc.

Yes http://www.grc.com/cih.htm read this - it has links to 2 further stories but pre - XP

marleyboy

GreenNotM wrote:

Yes http://www.grc.com/cih.htm read this - it has links to 2 further stories but pre - XP

Cheers, very interesting and is almost identical to the kind of problems I was experiencing, aside that this was not pre XP. I never actually found out (assuming it was a virus) what the virus was called, and where it got infected from. The first two pc's were Networked so Im guessing it passed itself on that way, but as for the 3rd pc, and my work freinds...I have no Idea