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As of late there has been a rash of CIH virus problems which infects Windows 95 and 98 EXE files. After an infected EXE is executed, the virus will stay in memory and will infect other programs as they are accessed.

CIH was discovered in Taiwain in june 1998, shortly afterword began showing up in the wild worldwide. It has been among the ten most common viruses for several months. CIH has been spreading very quickly as it has been distributed through pirated software.

CIH was available by accident from several commercial sources, such as:

        Origin Systems website where a download 
        related to the popular Wing Commander game was infected 

        At least three European PC gaming magazines shipped magazines 
        where the cover CD-ROM was infected - one of them even included 
        a note inside advicing users to disinfect their machines after 
        using the CD-ROM 

        Yamaha shipped an infected version of a firmware update software 
        for their CD-R400 drives 

        A widely spread demo version of the Activision game SiN was 
        infected as well - this infection did not originate from 
        the vendor 

        IBM shipped a batch of new Aptiva PCs with the CIH virus 
        pre-installed during March 1999, just a month before the 
        virus activates destructively 

CIH viruses are extremly destructive when activated. When it happens the virus overwrites most of the data on the computers hard drive. This can be recovered with recent backups.