Internet meme · Classic
Goodtimes virus
An infamous, fraudulent virus warning that first appeared in 1994; it claimed an email with the subject line “Good Times” spread a computer virus, but the virus did not exist and the warnings themselves became virus-like.
- First seen
- Last seen
- Uses cited
- 3
- Revision
- 2
Where it started
The Goodtimes virus, also styled as Good Times virus, was a computer virus hoax that spread during the early years of the Internet's popularity. Warnings about a computer virus named "Good Times" began being passed around among Internet users in 1994. The Goodtimes virus was supposedly transmitted via an email bearing the subject header "Good Times" or "Goodtimes", hence the virus's name, and the warning recommended deleting any such email unread. The virus described in the warnings did not exist, but the warnings themselves were, in effect, virus-like. In 1997 the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective announced that they had been responsible for the perpetration of the "Good Times" virus hoax as an exercise to "prove the gullibility of self-proclaimed 'experts' on the Internet".
The use timeline
An infamous, fraudulent virus warning that first appeared in 1994. The email claimed that an email virus with the subject line "Good Times" was spreading, which would "send your CPU into a nth-complexity infinite binary loop", among other dire predictions.
Wikidata Q5583639: Goodtimes virus — Internet hoax.
Examples
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