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.
