The article made me remember of this virus I've heard about. Supposedly, it was accessing a rotation media (harddisk, floppy disk? I don't remember) in different patterns and monitoring the failure rate for each pattern. Then it would keep accessing it in the pattern that caused most errors which would kill the hardware device - as the errors were supposedly from resonances caused by movements of the reading heads and would cause physical stresses in the device.
Wasn't that the sort of thing Tsutomo Shimomura specialized in? I remember it being hyped as part of the danger of Kevin Mitnick's hacking into his systems.
Anybody else heard about that?