quote:

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'Chernobyl' bug generates little fallout.
The CIH virus celebrates its first anniversary by striking some computers, but fails to live up to media hype.

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Well screw them.

I woke up this morning to a scene of horror on campus.

First of all, lets just say I live in on an island when it comes to access to breaking news. I, of all people, had not heard of the CIH threat. Even our SysAdmins hadn't given it any more weight than any other overblown myth that circulates around the net. That being said, we had up-to-date antivirus protection, so even those who did hear about it weren't afraid.

We got screwed anyway, and I mean screwed badly.

So what is this little beast? The CIH virus originated in Taiwan and spread there over bootlegged copies of Win95 and 98. It then spread to everything else there. On the 26th of every month it pulls a cute little move that results in your entire drive losing everything. The latest version got dubbed 'Chernobyl' as April 26th is the 13th anniversary of the Ukrainian nuclear meltdown. Besides, I couldn't come up with a better name for a virus that essentially melts down your computer.

We have a large Asian population on Student Visas from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea, etc. Thus it stands to reason that our campus was probably the biggest hot spot for CIH outside of Asia. And thanks to one of the highest CD Burner to student ratios in the world and a general cross-pollination of files of all sorts, lets just say that the casualties were high and could have been much higher.

The little bastard got onto the network I dunno how long ago and since that fateful day got passed onto everyone. Come this morning, whoever booted up got absolutely nuked. The Admins managed to save the network before we lost the server or our personal partitions on the network drive, but the network is out indefinately. I'm accessing the forums via a little loophole thanks to a standalone Citrix Winterm system running NT.
There were also heavy losses on personal machines. My roomate, all his friends, and more than a dozen others I can recall offhand lost everything. There were heavy losses amongst the staff as well... the Math Dept.'s system went belly up.

The strange thing is that no Anti-Viruses picked it up even though Symantic and McAfee have had protection ever since last August, leading me to believe this was a mutant.

The moral of the story?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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"......"
�������������-The Breen at Internment Camp 371

Very nasty virus. And now I'm asked by many people for help, now that the virus has done its damage. I tell them I don't know how to fix it, all I know is how to prevent it. *shrugs* Oh well.

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http://frankg.dgne.com/
Rodimus Prime: "No more jokes, Springer. Cybertron's in deadly danger. We're heading back there. Now."
Springer: "Yes sir, Mister Leader, sir."

Chernobyl hit a few personal computers here, but nothing really bad happened. I'm surprised, too, because the information technology people run the U of H network with the skill of underdeveloped cavemen most of the time.

My Clock battery is dead, so the clock is essentially screwed. I usually reset the time now and again, but right now, the internal clock is at April 4, 1999. (I reset it quite a while ago)

And good thing too. LOA showed me a file which was a checker for the Chernobyl virus, so I downloaded it. Then, my idiot-of-a-brother brought home a disk with a program a friend of his had and loaded it onto our computer. Turns out that program did have the virus on it. Had my clock been at the correct date, we would have been screwed literally. I told my brother to smack his friend when he sees him tomorrow, he doesn't know why I am going overboard over this (yeah, like he nearly tried to crash our computer.....)

Oh, thanks for the file LOA. Saved my skin back there.

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"......"
�������������-The Breen at Internment Camp 371

Boy, do I have some Mac horror stories for you!