Is it possible to NUKE a monitor?

[fateswarm]

I was trying the whole evening to convince a friend of mine that any nuke or any virus that is out there doesn't have the ability to breakdown a device, and especially a monitor!

His monitor is off and he is convinced by a friend of his, a "Hacker", that a nuke did it. Also he is convinced that his cdrom is not working due to that nuke.

The question is, am I missing something? I knew there was a variety of viruses on the 80s that could damage your hard disk, but is there a way that a "nuke" or a virus to damage another device, of any kind?

It just seems too impossible to me.

[ 19 November 2001: Message edited by: FateSWarm ]

[MGP]

Sure... there are a lot of ways to kill a monitor with a virus or malicious program.

You can set the video card to overscan the monitor. Bumping the horizontal refresh rate to way higher than the monitor can handle will do it. It usually burns out the horizontal drive circuitry or high voltage supply. Even the X Window installers warn you about this.

You can also shutdown the monitor (low power mode). How do you think the power management functions work?

Yep, there are a lot of ways to mess with someone's system hardware.

[thedexman]

I once saw this silly book that was reviewed on /. where some evil bad guy wrote a virus that would cause people's monitors to explode, killing the users.

[Niminator]

That may have been true at one time, but over time modern monitors have become more 'self protective', to the point where if something crazy happens to them, they'll just go blank. If his monirot is 5 or 10 years old, this may be true.