The Pentagon is worried that "backdoors" in computer processors might leave the American military vulnerable to an instant electronic shut-down. Those fears only grew, after an Israeli strike on an alleged nuclear facility in Syria. Many speculated that Syrian air defenses had been sabotaged by chips with a built-in 'kill switch" – commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden “backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar."

This all had a very familiar ring to it. Those with long memories may also recall exactly the same scenario before: air defenses knocked out by the secret activation of code smuggled though in commercial hardware.

This was back in 1991 and the first Iraq War, when the knockout blow was administered by a virus carried by a printer : One printer, one virus, one disabled Iraqi air defence.

*U.S. News & World Report published news of the Gulf War virus in its coverage of the war, a narrative that also found its way into "Triumph Without Victory," the magazine's subsequent book on Desert Storm. The Gulf War virus, wrote U.S. News, attacked Saddam's defenses by "devouring windows" Iraqi defenders used to check on aspects of their air defense system. "Each time a technician opened a window ... the window would disappear and the information would vanish." The virus was "smuggled to Baghdad through Amman, Jordan" in chips inside a printer. *

...or maybe not.

As The Register goes on to explain, this story actually started as an April Fool's joke:

Frankly, this is a great story. It's amusing to remember how it kicked up a storm in 1991 after its initial appearance as an April Fool's joke in Infoworld *magazine. * The gag asserted the National Security Agency had developed the computer virus to disable Iraqi air defense computers by eating windows – "gobbling them at the edges..." The virus, called AF/91, was smuggled into Iraq through Jordan, hidden in a chip in a printer – the latter being a distinguishing feature of many subsequent appearances of the hoax. The details of the news story match the hoax closely. It turns out the original story was translated in a Japanese magazine, where the joke element was lost. It was then picked up by US media including U.S. News

& World Report hen it was retranslated, and the rest is history -

"From there, the bogus story was reported by the Associated Press, CNN,

ABC Nightline, and newspapers across the country ."

John Gantz, who wrote the original spoof, was irked that US News & World Report, who covered the story never admitted their error. It turns out that two

'senior level intelligence officers' had confirmed the story… and they were not about to deny it now. One suspects that it suited them for people to believe killer chips were the secret weapon, rather than seeing any coverage of the actual electronic warfare technology used to take down Iraqi air defenses. Which is all fine – except that it might get some people looking in the wrong direction for the next threat. As The Register

notes, as late as 2004, at least one Air Force officer still thought the story was true. Are there other areas where defense policy is based on urban myths?