The virus was created by Chen Ing-hau (陳盈豪, pinyin: Chén Yíngháo), a student at Tatung University in Taiwan.

[1] It was believed to have infected sixty million computers internationally, resulting in an estimated NT$1 billion (US$35,801,231.56) in commercial damages.

[2] Chen stated that after classmates at Tatung University spread the virus, he apologized to the school and made an antivirus program available for public download.

In July 1999, copies of remote administration tool Back Orifice 2000 given out to DEF CON 7 attendees were discovered by the organizers to have been infected with CIH.

Both of these payloads served to render the host computer inoperable, and for most ordinary users, the virus essentially destroyed the PC.

Technically, however, it was possible to replace the BIOS chip,[citation needed] and methods for recovering hard disk data emerged later.

[10] CIH infects Portable Executable files by splitting the bulk of its code into small slivers inserted into the inter-section gaps commonly seen in PE files and writing a small re-assembly routine and table of its own code segments' locations into unused space in the tail of the PE header.

The payload, which is considered extremely dangerous, first involves the virus overwriting the first megabyte (1024KB) of the hard drive with zeroes, beginning at sector 0.