This is the story of an April Fool’s Day joke that got wildly out of control.
In 1991, a columnist for InfoWorld claimed that he learned of a hyper-advanced computer virus called “AF/91” that disabled Iraqi air defense systems during the first Gulf War. This virus had allegedly escaped Iraq and threatened every computer that used a windows-based graphical interface. The last line of the column revealed the truth: the story of the AF/91 virus was a fun bit of fiction for April 1st.
But shortly afterwards, a journalist for U.S. News & World Report reported on a virus that sounded suspiciously similar to AF/91, based on confirmation from two government officials. Though the report was clearly based on the joke virus from InfoWorld, the publication refused to retract. So for more than a decade the story was repeated as if it were true in newspapers, magazines, and even in a report by a major think tank.
The boys walk through the evolution of the strange tale of this virus hoax and speculate about why it spread so widely for so long.
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REFERENCES
Meta-Virus Set to Unleash Plague on Windows 3.0 Users
https://books.google.com/books?id=0FAEAAAAMBAJ
Computer Virus Story Proves To Be a Twice-Told Tale
https://www.newspapers.com/image/532416866/
Russian Views On Electronic and Information Warfare
https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/International_Security_Affairs/14-F-0564_DOC_01_RUSSIAN_VIEWS_ON_ELECTRONIC_AND_INFORMATION_WARFARE_vol_1.pdf
Taking a byte from Baghdad: Information War could hobble Iraq, but might become a two edged sword
https://www.newspapers.com/image/775197909/
One printer, one virus, one disabled Iraqi air defense
https://www.theregister.com/2003/03/10/one_printer_one_virus_one/
Attack Of The Trojan Printers
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2285234/attack-of-the-trojan-printers.html
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Premium Episode 293, The AF91 Virus Hoax.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Brokatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
So guys, you know, these past month or so on the show, we've been dealing with, you know, some kind of like heavy topics, stuff that's a little weighty in the news, stuff that, you know, is sometimes very threatening.
So I thought it would be kind of nice to switch gears a bit and bring you a story from the annals, from the history of disinformation and misinformation.
Wow, that sounds very, very fun.
Yeah, I mean, my instant reaction to you saying that, I'm like, we have?
You know, because what I've done is what Rambo does to that arrow wound in his side, I've poured gunpowder from a bullet into my brain, and I've long ago cauterized it.
So I feel nothing, but I do believe you, you know?
Because I know how to, like, kind of read context clues, and I can see others suffer still.
I feel nothing.
I'm like, oh, Papa Travis has come with something fun and maybe a little bit light.
I feel like I'm headed into the Scholastic Book Fair, you know?
He's using the disinformation word, but I hear that he's got his own little conspiracy theory about what's going on with this shit.
So I feel like, you know, he's always got to put on the prophylactic.
But once in a while, he's going to give you the good stuff.
The funniest twist of 2024 would be Travis getting pilled.
That would be so fucking bad, man.
That would be so bad.
I'm watching everyone online go completely insane.
I mean, just briefly, it is really disheartening to be on Twitter these days.
Not only are the supporters of both parties that are heading into an election going completely insane slowly, it seems, but also the For You page, like just the standard feed for me is just like horrible violence, like street fights and people like punching each other and bleeding.
It's genuinely like unhinged sexual posts.
It feels like we are really just like, I don't know, rolling around in a big fucking disgusting sewer on Twitter.
It's getting worse.
It just feels terrible.
The ads are, I mean, I don't even know what to say about them.
It is so often profoundly amoral.
Anyways.
I still have, I still have a habitual need to check Twitter or whatever, but I'll go on there and then there'll be like major active discourse about whether or not Hitler was misunderstood.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'm like, I'm not participating in this platform.
And you know, I'll try doing something else instead.
That's what Travis, Travis goes to Blue Sky like people take Soma in Brave New World.
It's better.
He just goes on a nice like one week vacation.
Like he's getting euthanized over there.
It's like me every six months going to Solvayne and being like, ah, I'm going to go to a little town that pretends it's Dutch, but really it's just in California.
But the truth is, even he probably knows that that platform also sucks, and so now he's just been hiking.
He's slowly logging off in layers, which I respect.
If you have been an internet user long enough, you may remember the popularity of computer virus hoaxes.
And these are just rumors about horrible viruses that don't actually exist, but manage to scare a lot of people.
Now, I personally have not seen one of these in a while, but they used to be common.
People are understandably paranoid about, like, real viruses infecting their computer, especially if you don't really understand how viruses work.
So, you know, people are eager to believe alarmist warnings and forwarded emails about some super powerful computer program that might be spreading and destroy all of your grandchild's Yelp photos.
In one famous example from the mid-90s, the hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow started a false rumor that viruses were being spread through emails that had the subject line, good times.
Wow.
They're already training us to not trust good times.
Sad.
I checked to see if, like, there were reports of more recent virus hoaxes, and I found one from 2017, which was called the Trump Suffering from a Stroke Virus.
Okay, that sucks.
That's like, they will know us by the Trail of the Dead, like, fan name type shit.
We gotta get it together, folks.
Through social media and text messages, people were warned that opening a photograph supposedly showing Donald Trump suffering from a stroke would unleash a virus.
According to Snopes, people received this message.
Urgent!
Dear brothers and sisters, if you have received pictures of Donald Trump suffering from a stroke, please do not open it, but delete it immediately because it will destroy all info in your computer and handphone.
Please pass this to all your friends and groups.
It seems like written by not a native English speaker.
Yeah, and also might be under 12.
Destroy all info in your computer and handphone.
No, not my handphone!
For today's episode, however, we are going to talk about the king of all virus hoaxes, which was called AF91.
This was supposedly a virus developed by the NSA and was used by the U.S.
military to disrupt Iraqi air defense systems during the first Gulf War in the early 90s.
Cool story, 100% bullshit.
Part of what makes this hoax fascinating is that the person who originated the story of this virus did it as an obvious April Fool's Day joke in a magazine for IT professionals.
Was there like a clue maybe?
Like left in plain sight?
Yeah, it was very obvious.
Not in doubt.
Like maybe the words...
But the narrative in this joke was for some reason affirmed by military officers who spoke to journalists at major news outlets.
It was repeated over and over again for years, despite being based on nothing, really.
For more than a decade, the myth of a virus that disabled Iraqi air defenses was published in newspapers, magazines, and even a report by a major think tank.
Now, I don't think it's been fully explained how this myth lasted so long or spread so far.
I have a speculative theory, which I'll get to in the end.
Oh, we love that.
Now, before we start, I think it's important to point out there's nothing inherently crazy about the idea of branches of the United States government using malicious software as cyber warfare weapons.
Even though in like 1991, there was like no real public information about cyber warfare conducted by the U.S., it certainly seems like something they would do back even back then.
And from the vantage point of 2024, we can point to concrete examples of U.S.
intelligence agencies doing this kind of thing.
In 2004, a Reagan administration Air Force secretary who was on the National Security Council named Thomas C. Reed claimed that in the early 80s, the United States had successfully inserted a software Trojan horse into computing equipment that the Soviet Union had bought from Canadian suppliers.
According to Reid, the software was used to control a trans-Siberian gas pipeline, and it failed, leading to a spectacular explosion in 1982.
Wait, so they tried to, like, they didn't do it on purpose?
They didn't blow it up on purpose?
I mean, this is what he says.
I mean, I have to say, like, I think it's worth mentioning that the Soviets never blamed the Americans for this explosion, and Reid's account has never been fully corroborated, so I guess I can't say 100% know what the truth is, but according to his account, it seems like this was an accidental incident, but I don't know.
Oh, man.
Yeah, that seems unlikely.
If they did it, they probably also caused the explosion, but they also might have not done it altogether.
So, fun stuff.
Cold War is just full of just like lies and shitty myths.
Yeah, it's cool.
We will never know the real history of the 20th century, which is kind of fun.
No, we really won't.
Even if one person is able to piece together a discrete part of it, there's nobody working on assembling everything all together to provide us a better image.
Well, that's not true, actually, Julian.
I've been a pretty busy P.E.O.
for the last couple months.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we were going to have a totally, you know, revised version of the Cold War ready, but unfortunately, once again, 2K has come out on consoles and PC and we lost the guy who was working on it to these games.
It's going to be like...
Ah, the northern faction of Ghostbusters versus the slave-owning Ghoulies.
They came together to fight in the middle of a basketball court.
So like 12 years a slave, but it's Slimer?
12 years a Slimer.
I hate you so much.
I just hate you so much.
I gotta stop here and say it.
Things I would do to you.
What's to hate?
What's to hate?
A lot of love here.
A lot of fun here.
Oh, man.
For a more recent example of cyber warfare, there's the case of Stuxnet.
This is a malicious computer worm developed jointly by the United States and Israeli governments in the late aughts and is reported to be responsible for damage to Iran's nuclear program.
Even more recently, there's the case of a Windows operating system exploit software called Eternal Blue.
In the early 2010s, the NSA discovered a vulnerability that could allow a highly technical person who knew about it to remotely access almost any network running on Windows.
Rather than disclosing this vulnerability so consumers could be aware of it and Microsoft could patch it, for five years the NSA kept it secret for their own purposes.
Awesome.
But their hand was forced in 2017 when a hacker group stole and released EternalBlue in other NSA cyber weapons.
A month after this revelation, cyber criminals immediately took advantage of the exploit by launching ransomware called WannaCry.
Okay.
It infected an estimated 230,000 computers and did an estimated $4 billion worth of damage.
So, what makes the AF91 virus hoax obviously not real isn't the idea that the government would use or deploy malicious software both in covert and overt warfare.
That's something that, you know, has happened and can happen.
It's actually not real because the original author of the story said very explicitly in the story of AF91 that it's an April Fool's joke.
The tale of this virus was first told in a print magazine called InfoWorld, one of the oldest publications to cater to information technology professionals.
In the April 1st, 1991 issue, regular columnist John Gantz published an article headlined, MetaVirus Set to Unleash Plague on Windows 3.0 Users.
So here's how that article opens.
I don't know if you should read this or not.
There's a new virus that may affect your computing life in the future.
The first I heard about this virus was in the Speaker's Lounge at February's Federal Office Systems Exhibition Conference in Washington, where I was on a panel.
I was organizing my slides when I overheard an exchange at the next table.
Have you heard about AF91?
Yeah, and I'm scared.
I've heard heads are rolling over at the NSA.
A lot of big military programs have already committed to Windows, and it looks like they'll be up the creek.
There doesn't seem to be an antidote.
How exciting!
An overheard conversation between two government insiders about some sort of thing called AF91.
Yeah, this is like a side quest.
A new virus may affect your computing life.
So just my life?
Well, this was the 90s.
Computing life was separate from your other life.
That's all I have, man.
You can't be taking this from me.
What was that like?
I'm actually now thinking about it, and I'm kind of convinced that every year 2K releases a virus for Jake's brain.
Yeah, and a virus for my wallet.
Like 150 bucks to get your guy to 99.
Absolute fucking bullshit.
It drains your wallet.
It literally drains your wallet if you open this game.
Oh yeah, all my apes are gone.
Oh god.
John Gantz, in his telling in this column, then questioned a Navy buddy of his about the virus.
This Navy buddy confessed that the virus was developed by the government.
He compared it to a real virus called the Morris worm, which was developed in 1988 by a Cornell graduate student and is often credited as being the first internet worm.
The column says that the Navy buddy said this, Remember the Morris internet virus?
Well, that was a virus developed by a hacker, an amateur.
Picture one funded by Uncle Sam, developed by the best cryptologists in the NSA, and set loose by the CIA.
Now, what I love about this hoax is that it was kicked off by someone who claimed, jokingly, but claimed to have information from an anonymous high-level government source.
Winning formula works every time.
Yeah.
Part of what made this hoax have legs is that the column uses some technical concepts to describe the unprecedented effectiveness of AF91.
Gantz explained that the virus is designed to exploit highly protected command and control systems through their less protected peripheral interfaces such as printers or monitors.
Once inside, a neural network component of the virus adapts the virus to work with virtually any architecture.
This is like sci-fi stuff, honestly.
Yeah, that's bullshit.
So this is what the Navy buddy said in the column.
Most real-time computers are protected by an electronic fortress, but not the peripherals.
AF91 sites just outbound of the security layer and then blast the peripheral controllers once the neural network has done its thing.
Each machine cycle makes the virus a little smarter.
Once the virus lodges, it takes a couple of weeks for that neural net to set up on a system that's on 24 hours a day.
I can imagine, like, a mid-twenties Sandra Bullock reciting this dialogue.
Like, okay, an electronic fortress, uh-huh.
Real-time computers, uh-huh.
I gotta say, I don't think I'm quite technical enough to quite understand where, like, the real tech-speak ends and where, like, the fantasy bullshit starts, but it seems like he's playing on that line.
This is movie dialogue.
This is like, it's just enough tech to make it sound like you know what you're talking about, but, you know, cinematic enough so that it blends.
This is an exposition scene.
Yeah, this is just like the word hacking over a little progress bar that goes from 0 to 100.
Yeah, totally.
My favorite kind of hack.
Gantz reported that AF91 was installed by the CIA onto a printer that was smuggled into Iraq and subsequently used by the Iraqi air defense systems during that Gulf War.
Wait, wait, wait.
So the idea, OK, so first of all, the description was talking about how the computer has to, you know, like have the virus cycle on it, quote unquote, and then it goes towards the peripherals.
Now we have the printer feeding the virus backwards.
No, no, this is this is the yeah, this is the this is the idea.
So he's basically saying that like, okay, so the main computer, this is protected, we can't get to that.
But like things that are attached to it, like the printers, we can infect the virus onto the printer, and then from the printer, infect the computer somehow.
This is how you know it's a joke, because the delivery system is a printer.
I feel like in the tech world, printers are always kind of the punchline, right?
They never work right.
We can't get them right.
Nobody's got one anymore.
It's like printers, you know?
The fact that it's the virus delivery system is on a printer is, I think, hilarious.
I mean, in 1991, printers were, like, such an important part of having a computer.
You know what?
Printers were so much better in the 90s.
They actually worked.
I mean, they were kind of an essential thing nowadays.
Like, who knows?
Yeah.
Remember, like, downloading drivers?
Being like, fuck, I'm missing a DLL or something.
And then having to, like, somehow figure out some website where you could download the missing DLL because Windows 95 was fucked.
Anyways.
We were a Mac house, so I don't know.
I don't know about any of that, but I do know that our printers worked.
Unlike the printers in my house today.
The printer in my house today.
Gantz said that more than half of the displays and printers used by the Iraqi air defense system were disabled.
The problem, as this Navy buddy explained, is that the virus migrated outside of Iraq and now the creators could no longer control it.
A couple of printers got out of Iraq into those jets that flew to Iran, and they got put to use by the Iranian Communications Bureau.
AF91 started spreading, and now it's mutated.
Dude, okay, there's just, oh man, just, it's really, really, I can't believe this took off in IT professional circles, because just so much bullshit.
I'm imagining like a fighter jet and you've got you know the the pilot you know a human pilot sort of sitting at the front and then strapped into the co-pilot seat is like a big bulky 90s printer.
I mean, the idea here is that like software is like a petri dish that it's just like developing itself.
I think we're just starting to see this this kind of like technology take off in any way.
Now, here's I think it's worth noting that at this time, after this hoax started getting some traction, a highly influential computer security expert named Wynne Schwartau argued that the supposed virus can't possibly work as described.
And that's because printers at the time only received information, so there was no possible way that a virus-infected printer could infect a computer.
A little bit different than modern printers, but this person essentially argued that the printers at the time just couldn't transmit data to the computer.
That's not something, that's not how that worked.
But also, nobody's going to write a virus for a printer.
It's not an environment that is worth writing for.
You'd have to write it for the specific software that each individual printer company... I mean, it's just not effective.
Not to mention the fact that it's essentially never going to reach the computer through the printer anyways.
The Navy buddy went on to explain that now AF91 had gained the ability to infect display software messaging.
It eats Windows.
It starts gobbling them at the edges, merging all the various bit streams into a hopeless soup.
Unfortunately, the virus lives permanently in the display device itself.
Gobbling them.
This MF-er... You gotta be real careful.
This thing, it fucking eats Clippy.
One minute, Clippy'll be helping you with a document.
The next minute, gobbled.
Starting with his feet, all the way to the top of his paperclip head.
You gotta be really careful with this thing.
It's mean!
I have bad news, though.
In 91, Clippy didn't exist because Windows 95 didn't exist yet.
Oh, who fucking cares?
It's the 90s.
Everybody knows Clippy is a funny joke.
I think it's cool that this, like, basically led to the Cookie Monster virus in hackers, where Cookie Monster goes across your screen just like eating up the screen.
Oh, yeah.
It's kind of the same concept.
The column went on to explain that the NSA believed that any computer that used graphical windows was doomed.
Which at this point would have been Windows 3.1, right?
Yeah, this was increasingly popular.
Like, there's still, like, most people use, like, you know, DOS text-based operating systems.
Yeah.
But, um, yeah.
It freaking gobbles up your windows, man.
According to the column, since the virus worked much more slowly in computers that were infrequently used, it might take four years before some end-users started to see their windows blur.
Now, in the final paragraph, John Gantz revealed that the entire previous column was a joke.
And now for the final secret.
The meaning of the AF91 designation.
91 is the Julian date for April Fool's Day.
So, April Fool's and then the number 91?
And then the name Julian.
What do we think the meaning of that is?
Oh, just you have to honor me.
Yeah, my calendar.
It's called the Julian calendar?
That's right, bitch.
You're on my time.
That explains a whole lot.
Yeah, that's why your life is a terrible slog and full of pain and misery.
It's because I'm scheduling everything you do.
So yeah, AF April Fool's, 91st day of the year, which happens to be April 1st, April Fool's.
Get it?
Wait, so this wasn't 1991.
Oh wait, it was April 1st, 1991 as well.
Yes, that too.
Oh, so multiple meanings.
Wow.
Clever.
Very clever.
Now, I read in some reporting about this incident that what immediately happened was that, like, IT professionals, like, started talking about it on forums and stuff.
Not as if it was real.
They knew it was a joke, but it was like, oh, well, this is sort of, this is funny.
It's an interesting idea.
How could it be real?
Like, it kind of, like, gamed out speculative, like, how a virus like this might work.
I tried to, like, dig into, like, I assume it was, like, Usenet groups, like, archives to try and find conversations about this.
I wasn't very successful.
But I'm told that it was just sort of a lot of fun, open conversation about the possibilities of a virus like this among the IT community at the time.
What's crazy about that is that experience couldn't exist nowadays.
It either has to be real or not.
It's like the idea that people are like, hey, we know that something isn't real.
It's kind of fun, but let's get on the internet and talk about it in a fun way together.
What if it was real?
How would it actually work?
That, like, really feels like a lost era.
Because nowadays, there would be a group of people that are like, well, it's definitely real, the April Fool's is the cover, they're trying to message, somebody on the inside is trying to message us, and the other side would be like, oh no, it's, it's, this is absolutely, it's not real, and actually talking about it is akin to treason.
So, I mean, what should have happened in this incident is that the readers of InfoWorld, they all had a little chuckle and they moved on with their lives, right?
But instead, some news outlets repeated variations of the story as if it was true.
The first publication to repeat this claim as if it's true was the U.S.
News and World Report.
And this was done in their coverage of the war in a report by journalist Brian Duffy.
The claim that the virus was real was even included in a 1992 book about Desert Storm by U.S.
News & World Report called Triumph Without Victory.
But here's the strange thing.
The book didn't cite the original article as the source of the claim, and it didn't even call it the AF-91 virus.
But we know it's the same one just because the description is very, very similar to the virus in that April Fool's Day column.
Instead, Brian Duffy cited two U.S.
officials.
So, this is from the book.
According to two senior U.S.
officials familiar with the matter, weeks before the commencement of the air war, a team of U.S.
intelligence operatives had slipped several electronic microchips into a French-made computer printer.
Okay.
It was a particularly slutty computer printer.
That's how it got infected.
It was French, you know?
It was into anal play.
That was being smuggled into Baghdad through Amman, Jordan.
It is unclear how the intelligence officials located the printer or managed to gain access to it.
But the two officials, knowledgeable about these events, said that the printer was subsequently delivered to a command bunker within the Iraqi Air Defense Network.
The microchips inserted into the printer carried a computer virus that was designed by the U.S.
intelligence technicians at the National Security Agency, the two U.S.
officials said.
Mm-hmm.
So this is adding new details, right?
So the original column, this is like the same thing.
Okay, so like they snuck in a printer that infected the computer.
And so it goes on to describe how the virus managed to infect computers through peripheral devices and somehow destroyed graphical OS windows.
The book describes the troubles that the Iraqis had because of the supposed virus.
According to one account, once the virus was inserted into the heart of the Iraqi air defense computer system, it disabled it by devouring quote-unquote windows as Iraqi technicians opened their monitor screens to check on different aspects of the air defense system simultaneously.
Each time a technician opened a window on his screen, one official explained, the window would disappear and the information in it would vanish.
The two officials familiar with this operation said the virus appeared to work as designed.
Gobble, gobble, gobble, all your data gone.
That's how, that's how information works.
See, like the computer takes the information from inside it and it puts it on the screen temporarily.
And then when you're done looking at it, it takes it back.
But in this case, it was on the screen and it was just like disappeared there.
So then the computer tried to take it back and the information wouldn't come back from the screen, from the windows.
Here's like a journalist basically repeating the AF91 story.
He doesn't call it that, but repeating the story beat for beat.
White labeling it, even worse.
And then yeah, like adding extra details like the French printers and stuff.
But like, but like, it's clearly, it's like, Happens to be the same basic tale as this hoax article or this joke article, really.
It didn't intend to deceive.
The original author intended to have fun.
But it's the same.
How?
But it's told as if it's credible because of information from two government officials.
Now, the question is, like, how the hell did this happen?
Now, I'm not really I don't really believe we have like some sort of like Stephen Glass situation where the like the journalist is just like making shit up.
I think that they're probably, like, actually reporting what they're hearing.
I think the most charitable interpretation of what happened is that a couple of U.S.
officials mistakenly but sincerely believed that the virus was real, and they both happened to speak to Brian Duffy, who dutifully put it into print in this newspaper.
But I suppose you can't rule out the possibility that the U.S.
officials knowingly fed this hoax to the press as if it was real for some reason.
And I'm going to return to that theory later.
Mm hmm.
This is the classic Coen Brothers problem of stupid or evil.
Since this claim now had the backing of a major news outlet, it started to be repeated by other major news outlets.
The Associated Press ran a report headlined U.S.
Reportedly Inserted Virus in Iraqi Computers.
It was also repeated by CNN, Nightline and several American newspapers.
Wow, well, it's just a comfort to know that they would never carry such stupid shit, say, like, about something called Havana Syndrome or anything else like that.
They would never just carry what-the-fucking-intelligence agencies, and they would never do that.
We've fixed our ways.
Of course, you know, readers immediately noticed, at least readers of InfoWorld, they noticed that the virus described in the U.S.
News & World Report article was suspiciously similar to the joke virus described in that InfoWorld article.
Despite that, Brian Duffy and his publication stood by the story.
He stubbornly defended his sources, which he now claimed were a senior official in the Air Force and a senior intelligence official, though he said he couldn't reveal their names because they had spoken on the condition of anonymity.
This is from a follow-up Associated Press article.
The main author of the U.S.
News & World Report article, Brian Duffy, said yesterday that, quote, I have no doubt U.S.
intelligence agents carried out such an operation, but that the similarities with the spoof article were, quote, obviously troubling.
Duffy said the magazine was rechecking the sources who told it of the operation to determine whether details from the spoof, quote, leached into our report.
Dude, okay.
So, what, the stories were next to each other?
Did they make contact?
These are like two different vegetables in the drawer and one of them is leading to the other one growing mold?
I think he's trying to say, like, well, it is something that actually happened, but, like, maybe some elements of the fictional story got, you know, mixed up in the intelligence official's mind and he sort of told me some bad information.
I guess that's my most terrible interpretation.
Sir, the gallon of water you sold us is piss.
Oh, interesting.
I'll have to look into how piss could have leached into the wonderful gallon of water I sold you.
Steve Wasserman, the editorial director for the book that also repeated the story, said that they stood by the story.
He chalked up the similarity with a fictional account as one of those curious and slightly irritating coincidences.
So that was basically that.
They stood by it.
They said they were looking into it.
They said it was a coincidence.
And so no correction was issued, which, of course, allowed the myth to be repeated.
What was the coincidence?
Well, so like, well, it's kind of a coincidence that like, you know, this fictional story is about a virus entering a computer through a printer smuggled into Iraq.
And it was also about this virus disabling an Iraqi air defense system and also about this virus eating windows, whatever the hell that means.
Yeah.
All these weird similarities.
So they were essentially like, well, of course we trust our sources, so yeah, it is kind of a coincidence that the very real story that our U.S.
officials were telling us kind of lines up and sounds like this April Fool's magazine article.
Very strange.
Well, what really fucking seals the deal is that both are technically like impossible and wrong in the same exact way.
So that's that's where you can't just be like, well, you know, life really imitates, you know, fiction or whatever.
But it's like, no, no, neither of these things.
They're comically wrong about how computers work in the exact same hilarious way.
So that makes sense.
And this wasn't just repeated in the media.
The myth of the virus also popped up in a paper produced by the influential conservative think tank Hudson Institute.
So this is an organization that produces research which contributes to shaping U.S.
defense strategies.
Like, high-level military people and people in government read these kinds of papers to help, they hope, better inform themselves to figure out what are the best strategies are.
And this is who we give the most money to, by the way.
This is where most of the money goes, is to these guys.
We're looking into reports that the head of the CIA was convinced on April 1st to tattoo Kick Me on his face.
We're looking into people being tricked into jumping out of windows, being told that the building is on fire.
We're looking into a variety of different cartoon deaths that all of our top officials are experiencing.
Sir, hear me out.
We'd like to give the most of the taxpayers' money to the dumbest branch of the government.
What do you think?
This is the most successful April Fool's ever, dude.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
So in 1995, the Hudson Institute produced a report called Russian Views on Electronic and Information Warfare, and it included a variation of the myth.
But in this version, Iraq purchased their whole air defense systems from France rather than the virus being spread through French printers.
But this is what the paper said.
There is no question that the effectiveness of computer counteraction will be fairly high.
This is evidenced by the fact that Iraq could not use the air defense systems bought in France against the multinational force.
Their software contained logic bombs that were activated with the start of hostilities.
Logic bombs!
The use of such a bomb or a virus will apparently be capable of producing the same results as conventional bombing of a state administrative body or a combat control post.
That is so stupid.
This is the very beginning of, like, posting as warfare.
Like, something that you do within the computer is akin to actual combat.
Well, I mean, you know, electronically disabling an air defense system is definitely warfare.
That's definitely part of combat.
Yeah, that's true.
But not for real, because it's not a real virus.
Yes, sure, if this were real, yeah, absolutely, an act of war.
But this, once again, they pretend.
It's a pretend thing happening on the computer.
Yeah, this case is, well, this paper is a person supposedly doing serious war analysis based on an April Fool's Day joke.
Now, this story was again repeated in March 1999 in an issue of the magazine Popular Mechanics in an article about information warfare.
This is eight years after it first popped up.
What's interesting about this account is that it doesn't really assert that the story about the virus is true.
It just notes that stories about this virus were spread around.
It kind of implies that it really did happen.
In the days following the Gulf War, stories circulated that information warfare weapons had been unleashed on the Iraqi air defense system.
According to these accounts, French printers exported to the Iraqi military were intercepted and equipped with special chips developed by the NSA.
On these chips were programs designed to infect and disrupt the communications system that linked anti-aircraft missiles to radar installations.
The Pentagon and NSA have repeatedly denied this.
Yet on the December night, air raids began anew during Operation Desert Fox.
Iraq's missile defense remained silent.
The official explanation is that Iraq wanted to preserve its remaining air defense assets.
Officially, it's also the case that no offense information warfare program exists.
Again, readers who think they're reading a very highly esteemed publication are again getting fed this bullshit near the end of the decade.
It's crazy.
Okay, but bear with me.
What if John Gantz wanted to break something that was like a national security secret, but he knew it would be fucked, and he knew he would be in big trouble, so he said at the end, this is an April Fool's.
I mean, I suppose I could rule that that would be very weird.
Checkmate, Mr. View.
Yeah.
I'll take my money now.
I'll say, but by all appearances, it actually really is a myth.
And like no account of this ever appeared until this guy wrote this April Fool's Day joke column.
This myth continued to be repeated as recently as 2003, 12 years after the hoax first appeared.
It popped up again in a column from the February 9th, 2003 issue of a newspaper called The Commercial Appeal.
The column was headlined, Taking a Bite, as in a computer bite, from Baghdad.
Information war could hobble Iraq but might become a two-edged sword.
Wouldn't it at least be like taking a bite out of Baghdad?
Taking a bite from Baghdad means like the Iraqis are biting you.
Anyways.
Maybe taking a small bite.
I don't know.
What does that mean, Jake?
You take a bite from something.
I take a bite from the sandwich.
No.
Yeah, I take a bite from this sandwich.
No, no.
No, no, no.
I don't think so.
The sandwich had a bite on it, and you took it, and it's in your tummy now.
No, no, no.
The author of this article is a man named Gary Pounder, a retired U.S.
Air Force intelligence officer.
Gary Pounder?
Why are we talking about my ex-boyfriend?
I thought it was an interesting coincidence that one of the sources that the journalist Brian Duffy used to supposedly confirm that this virus was real was an Air Force officer.
And then this bullshit story was published again 12 years later in a newspaper by someone who happens to be a retired Air Force intelligence officer.
I'm going to return to that in a moment.
But the column by Gary Pounder was published in response to the growing preparations for the Second Gulf War.
He discusses the role that Information Operations, or IO, will play in the coming conflict, and that potentially included the use of computer viruses.
The column goes on to recount how a computer virus supposedly disabled Iraq's air defense system, which was called KARI.
And also it claims that special forces somehow directly inserted a virus in a dug up fiber optic cable, which I don't think is actually possible.
I mean, we have a lot of technical people listen to this podcast.
Maybe when someone could tell me if this, but to my mind, it sounds like nonsense, but this is what the column said.
Agents inserted the virus in a printer shipped to an Iraqi air defense site.
The virus also was introduced via a fiber-optic cable that connected air defense nodes.
A special forces unit infiltrated Iraq, dug up the cable, and inserted the virus.
It remained dormant until the opening moments of the air war, when it went active and crippled Kerry.
The Iraqi air defense system never recovered, and Allied losses in the air campaign were minimal.
You just, yeah, you touch the end of the USB, I mean, but did USB even, you take the- No!
There's no commercial port on a cable that's like untouched.
The metal part of the floppy disk, you touch that to some of the wires in the cable, you can transfer data that way.
Do you think?
I don't know.
This sounds like magical bullshit, honestly.
Yeah, it's not not a thing.
Not a thing.
You wouldn't just have like a fiber optic cable.
OK, wait, no, hold on.
There's got to be there's some kind of terminal, handheld terminal, OK?
He didn't say terminal.
He said he dug up the cables.
You attach the clamps from the terminal onto the exposed wires from the fiber optic cable.
I think that would work.
Listen, we're not brainstorming a story in a screenplay, Jake.
Anyway, I thought this was weird.
I was kind of curious what else Gary Pounder had done, what he had written, what his work was like.
And I found an article that he had written for a journal called Aerospace Power Journal in 2000.
And this one had the headline of Opportunity Lost, Public Affairs, Information Operations, and the Air War Against Serbia.
In the article, Gary Pounder places some of the blame for bad media coverage of military campaigns on ineffective public affairs.
So, according to him, forces just aren't proactive and strategic enough in communicating information about the campaigns to the public.
It's a very long, comprehensive article, but here are a couple of passages I think communicate his main thesis.
In an era of relentless real-time coverage, the media has an indelible impact on public opinion, long identified as a critical center of gravity for any U.S.
military campaign.
Oh, my God.
This has some real, like, first line of someone's first essay, like, Oxford Dictionary defines Indeed, if information is, quote, the currency of victory on the battlefield, then public affairs, through its public information mission, can clearly supply some of the capital required for winning the media war, as part of the information operations campaign, and can bolster public support for the overall military effort.
Public information is, in fact, a battlespace that must be dominated like any other.
Accepting that fact will compel commanders, I.O.
specialists, and P.A.O.s to address public information strategy and planning issues, creating viable approaches for winning the media war.
In today's media spotlight, where battlefield events are analyzed and dissected as they occur, ceding the public information battlespace to happenstance or luck is simply not a viable option.
Wow.
Media war?
Info war?
Pounder was ahead of his time.
Pounder... Well, yeah, the media war.
I thought it was interesting.
Especially, I don't know, especially when you reflect upon that 2003 column I was talking about.
It happened to be published just a month before the war began in earnest.
And it sort of talked about the supposedly impressive capabilities of the military to use viruses to disable air defense systems that can help limit, you know, the limit casualties and stuff.
I imagine if I'm a member of the American public, perhaps a little anxious about this coming war, I'd be a little bit reassured to know that, you know, the military had such advanced capabilities to use technology and computers to limit just how horrible and violent and deadly war is all the time.
Yeah, but also they use these kinds of columnists and these kinds of, you know, privileged source information leaks to journalists so that they can scare the enemy, right?
So it's like intimidate the enemy by pretending you have incredible capabilities.
Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of strange because, like, follow me on this logic train.
So the facts of the matter is that one of the media sources that legitimized this bullshit story about a powerful computer virus that harmed Iraqi defenses was an Air Force officer.
And Gary Pounder, while a retired Air Force officer 12 years later, repeated a variation of this bullshit virus story in a newspaper column.
And on top of that, Gary Pounder also happened to write about the importance of winning the media war in order to bolster support for military efforts.
So, I can't prove this, what I'm about to say, but it sounds to me that it's at least possible that Gary Pounder read the original hoax Thought it might be a strategic advantage if people thought it was real.
You know, I don't know why.
Perhaps you wanted the American public to be impressed with its high-tech war capabilities.
Maybe you wanted to intimidate America's enemies by making them think that the U.S.
had access to super advanced cyber warfare weapons.
Then Gary Pounder acted as a source for journalist Brian Duffy claiming it was real, which led to it being published in U.S.
News & World Report and then repeated over and over again in supposedly respectable sources, which would make the spread of the story not a hoax, but a military information operation perpetuated through the mainstream media.
Which is kind of crazy to say, but I don't know if that's actually true, but the thought did occur to me.
It's very, very 2024 of him to read a made-up story in a paper and go, huh, it'd be cool if this was real.
It could do a lot of things if it was real.
Might have a lot of interesting implications.
What if I just said it was?
It also makes it seem like the United States is like this, you know, highly sophisticated war machine that's capable of limiting death in war by using information warfare techniques.
Whereas what really happened is more like the highway of death, which is just like mass bombing of like retreating units and civilians and stuff like that, which sounds a lot less, you know, sophisticated and cool.
So even if it is just to, like, take the place of the horrors of what the Americans actually did during the first Gulf War, it would be useful.
Also in 2003, technology writer George Smith wrote in his column Security Focus about why he thought the AF-91 virus story was so popular, despite the fact that it's clearly fictional.
Many have been enthralled by the Gulf War virus's siren call through the decade, almost all in efforts to hold up some proof Why was the hoax so successful?
Well, the easy answer is to simply call everyone who falls for the joke a momentary idiot.
But the Gulf War virus plays to a uniquely American trait.
A childlike belief in gadgets and technology and the people who make them as answers to everything.
Secret National Security Agency computer scientists made viruses that hobbled Saddam's anti-air defense without firing a shot.
Or maybe it didn't work, but it sure was a good plan.
In an instance of memes becoming real, eventually info security researchers did try to actually use printers to secretly access a network.
So this is from a 2010 article by InfoWorld, the same publication that kicked off the AF91 hoax.
Way back in 1991.
InfoWorld reported on an advanced threat hitchhiking inside printers shipped to Iraq.
The virus, known as AF91 and implanted by the U.S.
government, reportedly shut down Iraqi radar installations before escaping to spread among Windows computers.
The article, published on April 1st, was a spoof, but it spawned an urban myth that has been reported as fact in many circles.
Now the incident has come full circle.
Inspired by the story, at least one group of security professionals is using Trojan horse access points cloaked in printers and other office equipment to infiltrate clients who want their defenses tested.
Quote, we have been toying with a variety of different ways of getting hardware onto the network, says Steve Stasiukonas, managing partner of security services firm Secure Network Technologies.
Quote, you can put your box inside a printer tray and glue it shut, and who will notice if there are one or two or three power cables coming out?
In many cases, attackers can dress in the uniform of an IT supplier and drop off a printer for a company to test drive, Stasukonis says.
Once the device is connected to the network, the penetration testers have a platform behind any perimeter defenses from which to attack.
These poor printers, man.
Making it real.
They're getting poked.
They're like, look, you guys, all I can do is put the ink on the paper and spit it out.
You're sticking cables in my ass.
You're gluing my box shut.
So that's the story of AF-91.
It was a fictional virus in an April Fool's Day joke that was affirmed as real by military officials to journalists and repeated as real for several years before finally technology allowed cybersecurity professionals to try something like the AF-91 virus in the real world.
Mmm, perfect American story.
It's, I mean, it is wild.
I mean, I do think it's very strange that this is essentially a bit of an unsolved mystery.
Why otherwise, you know, real working journalists at good publications repeated this over and over and over again, and with their assistance of their military sources.
So your kind of working theory, and again, we're just speculating here, is that this started as a joke, but then these uncreative info warriors inside the Navy Intel offices decided to use it as a PSYOP.
Well, Air Force, but yeah.
Air Force, right.
Navy, Air Force.
Yeah, I like that.
I like that.
But I like mine even better, that John Gantz was really dishing the dirt, and then he hit it by pretending that it was an April Fool's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's very enemy of the state.
I just think it's another great example of our reality being dictated by fiction.
Like, here's this hoax, and then, you know, years later people are like, oh, remember that thing that wasn't real?
Like, what if we actually made it real?
It's like all this stuff.
We see stuff in movies, you know, from like the 80s version of what science, you know, the future looks like.
We're like, hey, What if we started making Johnny Cabs and actually put them into the real world?
It's one of those great examples of the fiction that we read or the fiction that we see on the screen gives people the ideas and inspires them to go try to create these things 10, 20 years down the line.
It's a beautiful thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
We really, yes, this beautiful joke inspired people to find better ways to install viruses.
Yeah.
Which is why, like, if you want to study what is actually happening in the information warfare space and the military space, you have to study Jake's brain, which is full of movies from the early aughts.
Yeah, yeah.
My Brain, Mad Magazine, that sort of thing.
Yeah, if you fold Jake's brain on itself, a hidden scene actually appears.
Yeah, what's the scene?
I'm really not sure.
I haven't tried it, but if next time maybe you come in to the studio so we can record and I can take out your brain and fold it.
I have a feeling that if you folded my brain to make a new picture, I think it would just be a smaller brain, which makes sense.
Yeah, but it's twice as powerful.
The density goes up by 2x.
In fact, my goal is to make your brain about the size of a dinosaur or bird's brain.
Make you have a pebble-sized brain, but it would be so powerful.
Boy, I'd really appreciate it.
Having such a large, bulbous, uh, brain has really been weighing on me recently.
Yeah, I mean, the main pain comes from all the empty space in there.
I'm going to put a bicycle pump in your nose and we're just going to figure it out from there.
You could just, why don't you just install a printer up there and maybe put a couple viruses in it.
Okay.
You're going to put your dick in a printer.
I'm going to put a bicycle pump in your nose and we're going to see if we can daisy chain.
This is what that stands for.
Daisy chaining.
Yeah, and in a couple weeks some intelligence official will write about this experiment and claim that the United States military has indeed figured out a way to cure cancer.
They're sending guys obsessed with Ghostbusters to Iraq and...
It's distracting all of the... It's actually stopped the insurgency in its... I'm hearing that he's giving them two generations old Xboxes and that the entire Iraqi army is actually addicted to an earlier version of NBA 2K?
He's explaining like deep lore and how the new movies are actually good and they link back to the original and tell two pieces of the story.
The freedom fighters, they're putting down their weapons!
He's a god over there.
Well, Travis, yeah, this was a great story.
Hopefully a little break in the gloom from our usual subject matter.
Yeah, this was nice.
But, listener, if you'd like to have more episodes from us, there's always the premiums.
We put up little samples every week, but you can go sign up at patreon.com slash QAA for five bucks a month.
You'll get a feed that contains both main And the premium episodes.
So it's just like one feed and you get everything as it comes out.
So that's nice.
Plus you get access to our archives of premium episodes, miniseries.
And it should be said, we have a very maniacal editor.
When he cuts those samples, it's really right before the good stuff starts.
You know, I always listen to the samples, you know, to preview them before we publish them.
And he really just, it's kind of right before the Best stuff comes.
He'll kind of cut it off 9 minutes, 10, 11 minutes.
This is, you know, very vindictive of him.
So, I would encourage people to, you know, to see what comes, to see what happens on minute 15.
See what happens on minute 27.
We also still have new merch available, I believe, until it sells out.
You can go to QAAPodcast.com and follow the link there.
And, you know, we have a hat, a mug, a two-sided t-shirt, a sweatshirt, or hoodie, sorry, with the new logo design in various different ways, sometimes in black and white, sometimes in color stuff.
Go get it.
Go get it.
Go check it out and go get it.
And fuck, I mean, I guess we will see you on this week's premium, folks.
Can't wait to spend more time with you.
Listeners, until next week or a couple of days from now, or maybe you've queued up another episode after this.
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
We have auto-cued content based on your preferences.
There's a new virus in the database.
What's happening?
It's replicating, eating up memory.
Uh, what do I do?
Type cookie, you idiot.
I'll head him off at the pass.
We have a zero bug, attacking all lock-in and overlay files.
Run antivirus.
Give me a systems display.
Now we've lost that 10 to 26.
Nope, we've got 10 to 40.
And 1 to 6.
Die, dickweeds.
A rabbit is in the administration system.
Send a flu shot.
Rabbit, flu shot, someone talk to me.
A rabbit replicates till it overloads a file, then it spreads like cancer.
