New 'Phlashing' Attack Sabotages Hardware

yahoi writes "A new type of denial-of-service attack, called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS), damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. A researcher has discovered how to abuse firmware update mechanisms with what he calls 'phlashing' — a type of remote PDOS attack."

Comments

Hardly a new phenomenon

[g051051]

This isn't exactly a new problem...in the early days, you could fry a monitor by setting the video card to absurd refresh rates, and you could destroy hard disks by issuing bogus stepping commands to the heads and slamming them into the stops.