Re: [Fwd: --> CRISIS on USENET -- SIGN THE PROTEST STATEMENT VIAE-MAIL]

From:	IN%"richieb@teleport.com"  "Rich Burroughs" 28-MAY-1996 19:12:55.39

>In the last week, there have been several thousand (and rapidly approaching
>10,000!) short posts swamping the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology (a.r.s.)
>by a person or persons unknown.  They are coming from several accounts, most
>of them forged or bogus, and when the account is closed by its site
>administrator based on complaints, the flood begins anew elsewhere.  In at
>least one instance a mail-to-news gateway has been used, necessitating the
>administrator to close all posting to a.r.s.  That one gateway has received,
>last we heard, 886 attempted posts by the spammer within a 28 hour period
>(which fortunately never reached their intended destination -- but thousands
>of others have.)

>3)  The use of semi-anonymous "throw-away" accounts somewhat follows the same
>    pattern used recently to cancel posts containing portions of CoS' "secret"
>    scriptures, and which used the boiler-plate statement "Cancelled due to
>    copyright infringement" as the justification for the clearly illegal
>    cancels.

>   b) Kill files work by finding posts having certain identifiable attributes
>      in the header or message body, such as the From: address -- but as the
>      spam on a.r.s. shows, we've got a moving target that will resist kill
>      files.  Any organization with enough money can keep getting throw-away
>      accounts that cannot be traced to the organization.  They can also alter

	I am curious as to what systems these throw-away accounts are on; they
would appear to be good output systems for ephemeral remailer endpoints.
Admittedly, I suspect that this will take ecash remailers unless they're all
through systems like aol.com that accept credit cards with inadequate
verification (from what I know, check digit(s) only).
	-Allen

On Wed, 29 May 1996, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

> 	I am curious as to what systems these throw-away accounts are on; they
> would appear to be good output systems for ephemeral remailer endpoints.
> Admittedly, I suspect that this will take ecash remailers unless they're all
> through systems like aol.com that accept credit cards with inadequate
> verification (from what I know, check digit(s) only).

AOL's been mass-mailing intro packages (I just got one) with free time. I 
presume we will be seeing a rise in spam as more service providers try 
these marketing techniques.