Chernobyl computer virus infected 60 million devices 27 years ago
Today marks the 27th anniversary of the activation of the "Chernobyl" (CIH) virus, one of the most destructive cyberattacks in history that crippled systems worldwide on April 26, 1999. Developed by Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau, the malware infected an estimated 60 million personal computers and caused approximately $40 million in global damages. The virus was uniquely devastating because it not only wiped hard drive data but also corrupted the BIOS on motherboards, rendering many machines completely unbootable. Primarily targeting Windows 95, 98, and ME users, the CIH outbreak remains a landmark event in the evolution of cybersecurity threats.
Today marks 27 years since one of the most famous cyberattacks in world history took place. On April 26, 1999, the CIH virus, known as "Chernobyl" (or WIN95.CIH), triggered its destructive mechanism on hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. This was reported by Ixbt.com report.
This malicious program destroyed data on hard drives and damaged the BIOS systems of many devices.
The CIH virus was written in 1998 by Taiwanese student Chen Inxau. According to public information, the virus had infected about 60 million personal computers and caused around $40 million in global damage.
The danger of the program was that it hid inside executable files and gained low-level access to the system without changing their size.
When the virus activated, it delivered its main blow to the first megabyte of the boot disk, rendering the data unreadable. It then attempted to write junk data to the motherboard BIOS.
As a result, many systems became inoperable without replacing the BIOS chip. Computers running Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME were hit hardest by the attack.
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