By Julian Feeld, Travis View & Jake Rockatansky
Published September 07, 2024 12:58am
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 sounde...