Taiwan College Says Ex-Student Wrote Virus

A former computer engineering student was identified in Taiwan as the author of the Chernobyl virus that this month caused hundreds of thousands of computer meltdowns around the world. The Tatung Institute of Technology said it punished Chen Ing-hau in April 1998 when the virus he wrote began to damage an inter-college data system, said Lee Chee-chen, the institute’s dean of student affairs. Chen, then a senior, was given a demerit but not expelled. The college did not impose a more severe punishment because Chen warned fellow students not to spread the virus, Lee said. Lee said he was not sure how the virus ended up causing so much destruction a year later. Chen graduated last summer and is serving Taiwan’s two-year compulsory military service, Lee said. The unusually destructive virus--timed to strike 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.