* stephen pearce <pearce.sg(a)gmail.com> [2005-09-27 05:46]:
could this be a virus using the recently identified hole in Firefox to download code to reprogram the flash rom?
How does a Firefox worm get root privileges? Well, okay, I suppose it could try to exploit other local holes. But why would a worm reprogram the flash ROM? How come noone has heard anything about such a worm so far? All in all, an extremely unlikely scenario.
The alternative is a static spike which fried a whole lot of disparate systems ..
would a hdd failure be consistant with being able to read to grub stage 2.?
Yes.
I have a hdd partitioned for windows 98 and linux .. I could not get past the grub stage 2 phase .. and the keyboard would not respond to trying to "del" during boot to access the cmos ... so I reset the cmos on the motherboard (perhaps in retrospect ill advisedly ... it now gives a keyboard read error ..)
That sounds rather like something a static spike that fried something on the motherboard might do. And I’d say Occam’s Razor strongly suggests the fried motherboard or crapped out harddisk over a so far unheard of multi-exploit worm. Try pulling out the harddisk and installing it in another machine to see whether it has actually suffered damage. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>