History
In September 1998, Yamaha shipped a firmware update to their CD-R400 drives that was infected with the virus. In October 1998, a demo version of the Activision game SiN was infected by one of its mirror sites. In March 1999, several thousand IBM Aptivas shipped with the CIH virus, just one month before the virus would trigger.
CIH's dual payload was delivered for the first time on April 26, 1999, with most of the damage occurring in Asia. CIH filled the first 1024 KB of the host's boot drive with zeros and then attacked certain types of BIOS. Both of these payloads served to render the host computer inoperable, and for laymen the virus essentially destroyed the PC. Technically, however, it was possible to replace the BIOS chip, and methods for recovering hard disk data emerged later.
Today, CIH is not as widespread as it once was, due to awareness of the threat and the fact it only affects older Windows 9x (95, 98, Me) operating systems.
The virus made another comeback in 2001 when a variant of the LoveLetter Worm in a VBS file that contained a dropper routine for the CIH virus was circulated around the internet, under the guise of a nude picture of Jennifer Lopez.
A modified version of the virus called CIH.1106 was discovered in December 2002, but it is not considered a serious threat.
The creator Chen Ing-hau later worked as a developer for Gigabyte Communications, a subsidiary of Gigabyte Technology.
Read more about this topic: CIH (computer Virus)
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