Cih Chernobyl A Virus That Shook The World

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Every old timer 'security enthusiasts' that
lived thru the year 1998-1999 have a sweet memory of a virus named CIH Chernobyl. For me myself, I have a friend of mine claimed to have a burnt motherboard after being infected by the virus. It's seems illogical but after full exposure of the virus and its behavior,  I admitted that my friend wasn't bluffing back then. The virus could infect the most popular o.s during that era,win 9x and it could dig and make way down to the bios chip ROM. In such cases, it can override the thermal proctection on the motherboard and was capable on burning the board. That's why I remember CIH Chernobyl,  is a virus that once shook the world.

60 millions computers have been reported to be infected by the virus and most of the cases are involving system bios damages with commercial damages round up to 1 millions dollar.

The virus was created by a student at Tatung University named Chen Ing Hau to challenge claims made by the proud antivirus developers of antiviral deficiency. Obviously, he won the challenge.

The virus was created on 1998,  first emerged and start spreading in 1999 thru the campus network by Chen fellow classmates. Then he apologized to the university and developed an antivirus together with Weng Shi Hao from Tamkang University.

The virus also known as the 'spacefiller'. It gained the name due to it's infection method to fill in the gaps in computer programs with its own code thus the file Size wouldn't increase avoiding detection by an antivirus (on those day, antivirus was not so popular).

Chen was never faced any lawsuit because no one ever filed a lawsuit against him and there was no crime legislation enforced in Taiwan during that time.Taiwan's computer crime legislation was written in consequence of the virus.

Among the biggest mislooked-overconfidence infection events associated with the virus including Yamaha Cd-r400 infected firmware distribution, a demo version of Activision Sin game and IBM activa shipped with the virus already infected the system.

On 26 April 1999, a dual payload of CIH was delivered with most of the infection happened in Asia. That was the time my friend's motherboard burnt out. CIH fill out the first 1024k of host boot drive with zero rendering the system could not be booted up and then attacked certain BIOS type. Both action impacting the host computer to be unbootable and most serious cases, the motherboard burnt out. Credit to CIH, methods for recovering damaged hard disk was created following this Event.

CIH Chernobyl have every honours to be remembered as a virus that shook the world.

Reference - wikipedia..

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