27 years ago today, on April 26, 1999, a 1 KB virus called CIH detonated its payload on hundreds of thousands of Windows 9x machines worldwide, zeroing out hard drives and flashing junk data to motherboard BIOS chips.
The virus, written by Taiwanese university student Chen Ing-hau at Tatung University in 1998, is believed to have infected around 60 million computers and caused an estimated $40 million in commercial damage, earning the nickname "Chernobyl" because its April 26 trigger date happened to coincide with the anniversary of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
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Despite the scale of the damage, Taiwanese prosecutors couldn’t charge Chen because no victims came forward with a lawsuit, as required under local law at the time, and Chen had claimed he wrote CIH to challenge antivirus vendors who he felt overstated their products' detection capabilities. The incident prompted Taiwan to pass new computer crime legislation.
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