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How can a virus damage my hardware !?

alphabeta
By alphabeta
in Operating Systems
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Overvolting your components and stressing them to 100%, shutting down all fans, etc. It's not common, but it has been known to happen.

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Very few infection malware are that low level, most often they will just waste system resources and slow you down by doing what they want to do instead. 

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How !?

 

It is very rare, but some viruses can alter the voltages of components, perhaps overclocking your CPU or turning off fail safes but very very very unlikely to occur

 

Most viruses just use up system resources taking up ram or hard drive space by running processes in the background.

 

Some viruses can encrypt your data preventing you accessing your files, the hackers then attempt to ransom you back the decrptyion key, but they just delete it and steal your money

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Well a virus is just a program and people can program them to affect hardware. A mate of mine made a virus that would shutdown the CPU fan about 10 years ago or so, with Intel it doesn't really do much because of the failsafes like throttling or shutting down but older AMD chips didn't throttle so they eventually burnt out.

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Overvolting your components and stressing them to 100%, shutting down all fans, etc. It's not common, but it has been known to happen.

can they overvolt?

as far as i know they can only increase load to 100%

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can they overvolt?

as far as i know they can only increase load to 100%

 

It depends on what kind of access they have. But let me put it this way: There are programs that you can use to overclock your components, so voltage can be regulated in the OS and doesn't have to be changed in the BIOS necessarily (the whole "shutting off fans" thing is definitely possible as well). If a virus did the same thing but against your will then it could do that, yes. It would be way more complicated to actually deactivate the safety measures on your CPU (like thermal throttling and protection against extreme overvoltage), but a virus could kill a CPU or a GPU over time.

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If they stress the hard drive and other components inside they may be able to wear it out, causing the computer an early death, especially in laptops when heat is a large problem

Remember to be a good citizen and choose a 'best answer' when your problem has been resolved!

(that way people know when a problem's been resolved)

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