The Good Times virus never existed. This page is its archive.

The warning

The first recorded warnings appeared on 15 November 1994. The earliest was brief: five sentences, a Christmas greeting, and advice not to open anything with the subject GOOD TIMES!!, because doing so would ruin your files. Later editions grew longer. The two most common versions, known as the Infinite loop and ASCII buffer editions, described in detail what Good Times would do to a computer that received it. A typical text read:

“FYI, a file, going under the name "Good Times" is being sent to some Internet users who subscribe to on-line services (Compuserve, Prodigy and America On Line). If you should receive this file, do not download it! Delete it immediately. I understand that there is a virus included in that file, which if downloaded to your personal computer, will ruin all of your files.”

Reproduced from the record of the hoax on Wikipedia.

The warnings usually contained the very subject line they warned against. To learn which message to delete, you had to open the warning, which carried that subject line. That is the hoax in one loop, and you are inside it.

The mechanism

The longer editions claimed the virus would send copies of itself to every address in your received and sent mail; that it would destroy your hard drive; that it would fill your ASCII buffer; and that if it was not stopped in time it would place your processor in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop. That phrase has no meaning in computer science. It sounds as if it should, which is why it worked.

CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capability of the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a bulletin on 6 December 1994. Its position was plain: no known virus could infect a computer merely through the reading of an email message. A program must be executed for a virus to spread. Reading text cannot run a program. The described threat could not work, because the described mechanism did not exist.

The spread

The warning did not need a mechanism. In December 1994 it was everywhere: inside AT&T, CitiBank, NBC, Hughes Aircraft, Microsoft and Texas Instruments, on news radio, and faxed between branch offices. It returned in March 1995, mutated to cite a report from the Federal Communications Commission, and again in October, and then it stayed, part of the landscape for years.

15 Nov 1994First recorded warnings circulate. The original text is five sentences long.
Dec 1994The warning spreads inside AT&T, CitiBank, NBC, Hughes Aircraft, Microsoft and Texas Instruments; it is read on news radio and faxed between offices.
6 Dec 1994CIAC bulletin: the message originated from an America Online user and a university student at approximately the same time, and was a hoax.
12 Dec 1994TidBITS publishes “Relax, it’s a Hoax”, naming CIAC as the source.
Mar 1995The warning returns, now citing a report from the Federal Communications Commission.
Oct 1995It returns again, and this time it stays.
1997The Cult of the Dead Cow announces it was behind the hoax, as an exercise to prove the gullibility of self-proclaimed experts on the Internet.

The confession

In 1997 the Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker collective, announced that it had been responsible for the Good Times hoax. Its stated purpose was to prove the gullibility of self-proclaimed “experts” on the Internet. The confession came three years after the first warning, by which point the warning had done the work of any successful virus: it had spread itself, without code, through hosts who volunteered to replicate it.

The verdict

Clay Shirky, quoted in a 2010 retrospective by the Coalition Against Unsolicited Email, described the warning as a thing that “tricks its host into replicating it, sometimes adding as many as 200,000 copies at a go”. CIAC’s Karyn Pichnarczyk made the same point at the time: the warning gained credibility because people deleted the message without reading it, “thus believing that they have saved themselves from being attacked”. The warning was the virus.

The scan

The scan examines this page, in your browser, and reports what it finds.

Pass it along

The original warning usually closed by asking to be passed along: “Happy Chanukah everyone, and be careful out there. Could you pass this along to your global mailing list as well?” The button below composes a forward of this page’s exhibit text, with a note attached explaining what it is. If you send it, you become the mechanism, as in 1994.

Compose the forward

Descendants

The hoax had children. Penpal greetings, Free Money, Deeyenda, Invitation and Win a Holiday all warned of viruses attached to subject lines. Bad Times was generally taken as a spoof of Good Times. Weird Al Yankovic recorded a parody called Virus Alert. And in 1999 the Melissa worm did the thing Good Times was accused of, followed by ILOVEYOU in 2000 and the Kak worm, which could trigger simply by previewing a message. They worked by executing code, not by being read. Some even contained the text “This virus is called ‘Good Times’”, hoping to claim the name. The real viruses were the ones that ran; the hoax was the one that was believed.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Goodtimes virus”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodtimes_virus
CAUCE, “Remembering the Good Times” (2010): cauce.org/remembering-the-good-times/
TidBITS, “Relax, it’s a Hoax” (12 December 1994): tidbits.com/1994/12/12/relax-its-a-hoax/

Facts above are taken from those sources; quotations are reproduced as they appear there. The scan and the forward run in your browser and write nothing anywhere.