Can you remote-"fry" a PC?
Here's the account of an occurence from a few years ago, something that has been nagging me a little ever since.
Back then, I used to hang out in a chat room associated with a cartoon-themed website, so naturally it had its fair share of youngsters, some right fruitcakes amongst them too.
That day the chat room had maybe 20 people in it. I was chatting a little with someone and there was this girl shooting the shit with someone else, they both being quite annoying what with flooding the chat with often multiple lines of inane drivel. I think I called them on that once or twice by ridiculing them a little, which was answered by cocky replies but didn't make them change their tone/spamming.
Anyway, at one point they turned to chat about music so the "perpetrator" (which I shall just call "Perp" from now on) posted a shoutcast URL - note: not just to her chat partner, mind, but globally to the chat room.
Wondering what kind of music that might be, I clicked on the URL so the stream would play back in WinAmp. As you may have guessed the song that came up as I tuned in was rather awful, but I just left it running for a bit in the hope it might become better.
A few minutes in, "Perp" then suddenly addressed me in the chat room and told me bluntly to get the f*ck off the stream (I guess she saw my IP which was also visible using the /whois function in the chat room). To which I just as bluntly replied that I won't because she publicly posted the URL to the whole room, so if she didn't want anyone else to listen in she should just have posted it to her chat partner in a private message instead. I don't remember what else we said in the chat after that.
Anyway, another couple of minutes later she uttered, in the music stream, as a kind of warning to me, something along the lines of "the storm is drawing closer" and played a song that had the vocals "I'm gonna get you" or something similar (I had never heard that song before). I shrugged it off, just thinking what a silly twat she was.
And then, near the end of that particular song, it happened. My screen went black, as if I had pressed the reset button at the front of the computer to re-boot. Except it didn't go any further. Instead, some diagnostical function built into to the motherboard just spat out a voice sample saying "System failed CPU check" indefinitely.
I never got that PC to work again, even after buying a new processor and putting it into the slot, just the same voice sample bollocks. I could not even get to the BIOS, the screen stayed black. So in the end I gave up and had to buy a new PC.
Now, here's my question in the hope that the more tech-savvy WOSsers can shed some light upon this - can such a thing be done remotely? Or more precisely, what could it have been? Overclocked my processor remotely, wrote something to the BIOS (I have edited this to bold this part, as it seems like part of an explanation)? I have no clue what is possible, that's why I'm bringing this up. I mean, it's HIGHLY unlikely the motherboard would have "naturally" chickened out just that particular moment despite running with no problems for more than 3 years ...
Back then, I used to hang out in a chat room associated with a cartoon-themed website, so naturally it had its fair share of youngsters, some right fruitcakes amongst them too.
That day the chat room had maybe 20 people in it. I was chatting a little with someone and there was this girl shooting the shit with someone else, they both being quite annoying what with flooding the chat with often multiple lines of inane drivel. I think I called them on that once or twice by ridiculing them a little, which was answered by cocky replies but didn't make them change their tone/spamming.
Anyway, at one point they turned to chat about music so the "perpetrator" (which I shall just call "Perp" from now on) posted a shoutcast URL - note: not just to her chat partner, mind, but globally to the chat room.
Wondering what kind of music that might be, I clicked on the URL so the stream would play back in WinAmp. As you may have guessed the song that came up as I tuned in was rather awful, but I just left it running for a bit in the hope it might become better.
A few minutes in, "Perp" then suddenly addressed me in the chat room and told me bluntly to get the f*ck off the stream (I guess she saw my IP which was also visible using the /whois function in the chat room). To which I just as bluntly replied that I won't because she publicly posted the URL to the whole room, so if she didn't want anyone else to listen in she should just have posted it to her chat partner in a private message instead. I don't remember what else we said in the chat after that.
Anyway, another couple of minutes later she uttered, in the music stream, as a kind of warning to me, something along the lines of "the storm is drawing closer" and played a song that had the vocals "I'm gonna get you" or something similar (I had never heard that song before). I shrugged it off, just thinking what a silly twat she was.
And then, near the end of that particular song, it happened. My screen went black, as if I had pressed the reset button at the front of the computer to re-boot. Except it didn't go any further. Instead, some diagnostical function built into to the motherboard just spat out a voice sample saying "System failed CPU check" indefinitely.
I never got that PC to work again, even after buying a new processor and putting it into the slot, just the same voice sample bollocks. I could not even get to the BIOS, the screen stayed black. So in the end I gave up and had to buy a new PC.
Now, here's my question in the hope that the more tech-savvy WOSsers can shed some light upon this - can such a thing be done remotely? Or more precisely, what could it have been? Overclocked my processor remotely, wrote something to the BIOS (I have edited this to bold this part, as it seems like part of an explanation)? I have no clue what is possible, that's why I'm bringing this up. I mean, it's HIGHLY unlikely the motherboard would have "naturally" chickened out just that particular moment despite running with no problems for more than 3 years ...
Post edited by XTM of TMG on
Comments
Cant believe there was some of 'super hacker techy geek' in a forum on a cartoon themed website ?!
I've heard of small 'exe' files which when installed on someone elses computer you can obviously take it over, eject the cd tray and do other things to wind up the other user.
But to do what you wrote in that mail, blimey, sounds super clever.
We've all had a few of those type of 'woah' moment in our lives I'm sure.
EDIT: If such a thing was possible there would be 10001 virus's out there doing the same thing.
That site had been existing for many years already and I didn't mean to make it sound like it was a site where only kids hang around ... far from it, I would assume most of the people on there would have been around 15-20, with plenty of people older than that but obviously outnumbered. Anyway, geeks start really early these days ... I also guess she had some nerdy friends to help her out a bit.
Though I don't know what you mean by "mail" (the part I bolded)? You don't mean my "post" do you? ;)
Well, I googled about a bit and found this:
http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-95/frying-computer/107759.html
Ultimately I'll never know what happened but still, coincidence? Do you really believe a computer runs without any problems whatsoever for over 3 years, only to totally croak pretty much at exactly the same time someone threatens to take you down? Nah, I don't believe in such coincidences.
Sure...otherwise it wouldn't be a coincidence. A computer dying after 3 yrs isn't THAT uncommon...yours just happened to do it at that exact time and so making it a coincidence.
I've had several coincidences.
Used to live in Manchester and worked at a wholesalers dealing with customers. 6 Months after moving to Texas some.. 4000 odd miles away I'm walking through the Mall one day and bump into someone...after apologizing and looking up...I see it was one of my customers from the backstreet wholesalers back in Manchester....coincidence?
Another similar one...When I worked for Compaq I was sent to a small town in Kentucky...some really out of the place, back end of no where town. I'm sitting in the only bar in town one night and start talking to the guy next to me...turns out he used to live 2 miles from me in Manchester and knew half the people I did...coincidence again..
The law of averages (if there is such a thing) says coincidences will happen...hence the existance of the word!
Also, Shifter: know of a good place where I can get lots of cheap firewood? Now if only I knew how to locate that witch, I'd gladly invite you to watch the BBQ ;)
My last job, I was the OPs manager and had to send someone to Bangkok to fix some printers we had sold over there....I had a Vietnamese guy (several actually) working for/we me so he was the obvious choice. His wife was also Vietnamese but had both been raised in the USA from being kids and met here, they were having a few marrital problems at the time.
So he was all excited about the trip etc.....
When he gets back I'm asking him if he had a good time etc and he is dejected...and tells me this...
He goes out one evening to a local bar in Bangkok and 3 girls in the bar start talking and flirting with him etc..and they proceed to have a good time etc. (He didn't say if he went back to his hotel with them)...
Anyway....It just so happened at that exact time, in that exact bar, half way around the world.....2 of his wife's cousins are there...recognized him from photos (they had never met)....took pictures with their cell phones of him with the girls...emailed/sent them to his wife....
He gets home a few days later and she is naturally none to happy and shows him the photos of him with these 3 girls.....
I wouldn't believe that could happen myself if I didn't see it! amazing.
And thus, in true WOS style, we have entered off-topic land. So I may as well add one myself.
Actually I do have a similar story regarding coincidences. I don't know if I have posted this on WOS before, I know I've posted it on an English-language website though. I just wrote it up so here goes.
Many years ago, my family and I lived in a rather poor neighborhood of this town - high unemployment, lots of immigrants ... we lived on the 7th floor of a 19-storey skyscraper. There was a long balcony along the whole flat, with me having a balcony door at my room so I usually left it open during the summer months.
With open balcony door, you could usually hear it inside the flat when people outside on the street were shouting. Since it was a somewhat rough neighborhood, you'd naturally hear some profanities being exchanged every now and then.
Anyway, there I was, around 1999 or 2000, renovating the flat which we would finally move out of (we had to give it back to the landlord renovated). A friend who hadn't visited this part of town too often was there to give us a hand, so I told him a bit about this place.
I semi-jokingly said: "Well, if you keep your balcony door open in this place, you are bound to hear someone yell 'son of a bitch' over the course of a day."
I swear I am not making this up - just a few seconds after I had said that, someone outside shouted 'son of a bitch' :razz:
funnily enough the next day a UFC champion stabbed my eye out, fancy!
Mmmm, interesting... Well most good firewall software such as Bullguard instantly tells you if a program is attempting to open a service port via tcp or ftp, so unless you had some useless firewall and/or anti virus program then I fail to see how they could of done that. As for reflashing the bios, it would theoritically be possible if you clicked on a malicious exe, but then their is the probability that each BIOS is different in that the BIOS chips and/or memory addresses of the BIOS are different depending on the manufacter of your motherboard.
My assumption is that it's down to maybe the motherboard developing a fault by other means than some immature chat room w*nker who thinks he's a kiddie scripter.
Incidently, the new motherboards now enable you to recover the bios from a recovery cd if the bios firmware gets overwritten. Asus used this with the introduction of their A8N SLI Deluxe when I built my Athlon system a couple of years ago.
;)
But... government scientists are working on electromagnetic field weapons.
I heard about EMP weapons when watching a documentary about computers that was hosted by Jeremy Clarkson. In that very documentary Clarkson talked about EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) weapons. The theory goes that if you sustain a slab of silicon to a large magnetic field (such as a micro processor) to a strong magnetic field, the contents of the chip are written with garbage. Jeremy Clarkson then showed what happened to a PC when it was exposed to an EMP pulse. The results were quite outstanding; the computers screen went AWOL and the BIOS was wiped...
Just imagine the after effects of exploding such a weapon over central europe. Every computer system would be rendered utterly useless !
Info of EMP and it's effects can be read at the link below:-
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread59555/pg1
Coincidence - I'm just reading this thread, when I happen upon Beanz's post - 2 minutes later I'm eating BEANZ on toast? Coincidence? Or influence? :-o :p
once at work.. once a woman who I went to uni told me about it..
both were , they changed the voltage at the back of the PC or MAC.. to 110
the woman did it to her ex boyfriend.. nice...not..lol
it's just coincidence, you would need low level calls to access the bios etc , so it's just happened at the same time..
at the moment i'm having fun with a corrupt hard drive that I need to recover. aggh!
I can recover BIOS from a CD, USB stick or the on-board BIOS back-up on the MoBo...I can have 2 different BIOS set-ups and switch between them for O/C'ing and normal usage.
:grin:
[/cheesy]
Seriously, the ASUS Rampage II Extreme is one helluva MoBo.
There's no way I'm gonna do a search for that on the internet.
it's not a theory, it's a well documented process :)
The field has to change very fast hence being called a pulse. simply a huge magnetic field won't affect solid state devices at all
(it's the large current induced by the changing magnetic field that kills the transistors)
lol @ that URL. Those forum posters are so L337 with their secret EMP bombs lol.
I have a book that has step by step instructions for building one. You can purchase it at all good bookshops :)
A clip is on megavideo @ http://www.megavideo.com/?v=BYW2N82L
Vaccum tubes (mainly used in sound systems) are immune to the effects of EMP and if your computer was switched off from the power supply, it would be protected from the same effects.
I seem to remember a story about the Russians putting vacuum tubes in the Mig29-Fulcrum and the US 'techs' laughing at them..until they realized that during a nuclear attack the Russian fighters would still fly while the US fighters would be 'EMP-ed' and sitting on the runway useless.
EDIT:
Oh it was the Mig25.
The aircraft's capabilities were better understood in 1976 when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected in a MiG-25 to the United States via Japan.
The majority of the on-board avionics were based on vacuum-tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Although they represented aging technology, vacuum tubes were actually more tolerant of temperature extremes, thereby removing the need for providing complex environmental controls inside the avionics bays. In addition, the vacuum tubes were easy to replace in remote northern airfields where sophisticated transistor parts might not have been readily available. As with most Soviet aircraft, the MiG-25 was designed to be as rugged as possible. Moreover, the use of vacuum tubes makes the aircraft's systems more resistant to an electromagnetic pulse, for example after a nuclear blast.[15]
Thanks to the use of vacuum tubes, the MiG-25P's original Smerch-A (Tornado, NATO reporting name 'Foxfire') radar had enormous power — about 600 kilowatts.
None of the vids there work over here, must be a European-access site only.
Oh, well.
so when the world is a heaping pile of molten slag and the inhabitants are all burned, blind and full of delberating cancer, the russians could field a fighter to take out disabled american planes.
now that's military planning. :-P
I'll keep this in mind when I travel to Portugal this Summer. :-o
a laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is an optical maser* (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)...
so that makes it a hand held microwave optical maser :p
</pointless pedantry>
;)
* yes I know this is the "wrong" way round as microwaves are a form of light, but the fact is that the maser came first :)