• Recommend:
• 0 Comments

An Antidote for CIH Virus?

Bangladesh student plans to update fix for nasty virus.

By Sanjit Singh, IDG News   

The CIH virus, also known as the Chernobyl virus, was created by Taiwanese former student Chen Ing-hau and caused havoc throughout Asia April 26, infecting thousands of PCs in South Korea, Singapore, India, Bangladesh, and China.

But reportedly there is a cure, courtesy of Monirul Islam Sharif, an undergraduate computer science student at Dhaka University in Bangladesh.

Sharif, 21, says he wrote the 70KB program, which he calls MRecover, in 24 hours.

"I started working on it April 27, when a friend brought his infected hard drive to me, and by the next day, it worked when I tried it out. Most of the data on the disk was recovered."

Sharif tried the antidote on several other computers at Dhaka, and it reportedly worked on those too, recovering data in minutes.

A Few Provisos

"If your machine uses FAT32, MRecover will recover all the data on the disk within three to four minutes. But if your computer uses FAT16, then it will recover all data after the first partition, limiting the recovery to between 40 and 60 percent," Sharif says. He added that the antidote does not work on hard drives with a capacity of 8GB or more.

PC World has not investigated Sharif's claims; use the software at your own risk (assuming you have anything to risk on an already infected machine).

The program is available free on the Web to anybody who wants to download it. An improved version for machines that use FAT16 will be ready within days, and will be followed by one for large-capacity hard drives.

A Minor Hero

Sharif says he has received 3000 hits and innumerable e-mail messages since he put MRecover on the Internet May 5, but the inventor does not expect any commercial gain from the program.

Sharif, who was born in England and spent his early childhood there, graduates next June. He says his ambition is to head to the United States for advanced studies.

"I would like to go to the U.S. to do a masters in computer science. But it's unlikely that I will specialize in antivirus programs. I still find general programming much more interesting," he says.