In brief: CIH virus strikes again

NEWS A virus which strikes on the 26th day of each month, hit more than 1,000 systems across the US this week. The CIH virus is spread via executable files - which end in '.exe' - and deletes the first 1MB of each hard disk it infects. It also affects systems with reprogrammable Bios software. Carey Nachenberg, chief researcher at the Symantec Anti-virus Research Center in California, said: "The CIH virus is what we call a fast infecter. If it is active in memory, then every time an anti-virus scanner scans a Windows file, the virus attempts to infect that file." To overcome this problem, Nachenberg advised users to update their anti-virus products, or reboot their system in DOS and run a virus scan.