The CIH Virus

The CIH Virus

On April 26, 1999, systems all over the world started dying. Something was both harmful info on hard disk drives and harmful their BIOS chips. Analysis switched in the CIH Virus, later referred to as Chernobyl since it was launched about the anniversary from the Chernobyl reactor explosion.

The CIH virus in some way found it's way onto some IBM Aptiva PC's offered to Activision in March of 1999. Every copy of the latest game, SIN, came bundled up having a bonus copy from the CIH virus.

If this infects something, herpes really squeezes into empty spaces in operating-system files. CIH was sometimes referred to as Spacefiller virus with this ability.

Once the virus triggered, the very first factor it did ended up being to overwrite the very first megabyte from the hard disk with zeroes. That part of the hard disk is crucial, because this is where the partition details are usually saved.

When the hard disk was hit, herpes would then use the BIOS nick.

BIOS means Fundamental Input Output System. The BIOS nick may be the ROM, or Read Only Memory, from the computer. With no BIOS, the pc would forget how you can "talk" towards the other hardware within the computer, such as the keyboard and hard disk drives.

Normally, the BIOS is read-only. But by 1999, BIOS producers had switched to chips that may be "exhibited," or reprogrammed. The CIH virus attempted to make use of this capability to erase the BIOS.

Essentially, herpes would attempt to get rid of the computer, first by looking into making the hard disk unreadable, after which by looking into making sure the machine wouldn't boot with no new BIOS nick. Fortunately, because of a bug, this program only understood how you can erase one make of chips.

CIH was still being harmful computer systems in Asia annually after it first triggered, and many infections happen to be launched that attempt to infect systems with more recent versions of CIH.