A lot of you may have heard about this particularly nasty virus that
delivered its payload three days ago. Incidentally, does anyone besides me
think that the numbers being tossed around about problems in the US (10K in
this case) are awfully underestimated? I know some colleges got hit really
hard--Boston College for instance, and we all know how fast these things
can spread in a campus environment. As it happens, I know at least a dozen
people here at Miami that got hit... the statistics just don't add up in my
mind, at least not if the people I know are even close to being a
representative sample.

---begin---
Taiwan college identifies computer virus author
April 29, 1999
Web posted at: 9:32 a.m. EDT (1332 GMT)


TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- A former computer engineering student was identified
by his college today as the author of the Chernobyl virus -- the menace
that caused hundreds of thousands of computer meltdowns around the world
this week.

The Tatung Institute of Technology had punished Chen Ing-hau last April
when the virus he wrote as a student began to cause damage in an
inter-college data system, according to Lee Chee-chen, the institute's dean
of student affairs.

Chen, who was a senior at the time, was given a demerit but not expelled.

The Chernobyl virus is known in Taiwan as the CIH, using Chen's initials.

The college did not mete out a more severe punishment because Chen had
warned fellow students not to spread the virus, Lee said. Chen did not come
up with an anti-virus program, Lee said.

Lee said he was not sure how the virus ended up causing so much destruction
a year later.

Chen graduated from the college last summer and now is serving Taiwan's
two-year compulsory military service, Lee said. Officials of the Bureau of
Criminal Investigation said they would seek permission to question Chen.

The unusually destructive virus -- timed to strike on April 26, the 13th
anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster -- tries to erase a
computer's hard drive and write gibberish into its system settings to
prevent the machine from being restarted.

Turkey and South Korea each reported 300,000 computers damaged Monday, and
there were more elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East. Fewer than 10,000 of
the 50 million computers in the United States were affected.
---end---

--
Robert E. Williams, Jr.
President/MCUG Librarian
Miami Computer Users' Group
Miami University, Oxford, OH

E-mail: <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Home Page: <http://miavx1.muohio.edu/mcug/>