In fact, it\u2019s the one of the most widely believed myths in the infosec world. At the same time, it\u2019s the most non-standard one. That double-sided nature is likely the reason why the myth is so enduring.<\/p>\n
At the dawn of the PC era, the late 20th century, users frequently spread scary stories that happened \u201cto one of good friends of theirs,\u201d from a virus. In such stories, viruses, for instance, fed some \u2018wrong\u2019 interlacing to a CRT monitor and \u2018burned out\u2019 the PC\u2019s hardware components. In other tales, malware made HDD plates \u2018resonate\u2019 fiercely, ultimately destroying hard drives. Or overclocked a floppy drive to cause an imminently deadly rotor overheat.<\/p>\n
Antivirus developers have constantly busted those myths. Sure some of these cases are theoretically plausible, but built-in foolproof protection mechanisms don\u2019t allow such failures to happen. So, as they say, sleep tight, little friends, they shall not pass, and all that kind of stuff.<\/p>\n
Fact or Fiction: can a #virus actually damage PC hardware? #infosec<\/p>Tweet<\/a><\/blockquote>\n
Users pretend to be satisfied with these explanations, yet continued to believe in myths. Anything can happen, after all, with vendors hushing up things.<\/p>\n
Yet, life is a curious thing and full of surprises. For example, back in 1999 a massive Win95.CIH (a.k.a. Chernobyl) virus pandemic took over thousands of machines. That malware corrupted data stored both on a hard drive and on BIOS chips on motherboards. Some of the affected PCs would not start as their boot program was damaged. To level the adverse effects of the attack, one had to replace BIOS chips and rewrite the data.<\/p>\n