full-disclosure - Destroying PCs remotely?

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From: gem at rellim.com (Gary E. Miller)
Subject: Destroying PCs remotely?

Yo Andr?!

I have UPS on everything in my office.  Got tired of replacing things
monitors and disk drives every time the power bounced up and down a
few times.

Disk Drives are like Car Starters.  They are only meant for intermittent
duty.  Last I checked, most HDs will kill the spin motor power transistors
if you power them up and down 5 or 10 times in about 1 minute.  You can
certainly power up/down the HD with ACPI.  Maybe the drive is smart
enough not to exceed it's rated duty cycle.

DPMS can turn the HV circui on and off a video monitor.

Most PC QA deptartments power cycle all new PCs every 15 minutes for
24 hours.  Scary to walk past the burn in racks and see all the dead PCs...

So to summarize, to try to kill a PC we would try and or all of:
	power down the fans to cook the CPU
	overclock the CPU to cook it
	power cycle the monitor and HDs every 5 or 10 seconds to kill them.

And of course any good hacker knows to wipe the disk clean to cover his
tracks!

RGDS
GARY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary E. Miller Rellim 20340 Empire Blvd, Suite E-3, Bend, OR 97701
	gem@...lim.com  Tel:+1(541)382-8588 Fax: +1(541)382-8676

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Andr? Lu?s Quintaes Guimar?es wrote:

> Hmm, since kid I always thought interesting the idea of using apm to
> repeatedly turn on and off monitors and hard drives until they burn. Off
> course nowadays it would be kinda hard to suceed.