Re: Newsgroup Spam

On Nov 19, 12:07 pm, mikes2653 <mikes2...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If the "sporgenza" occurred only on rec.pyro, I'd suspect it was a
person who last fall asserted that this group would be shut down by
the government. One might suppose the frequent posting of material
involving espionage/foreign intelligence and middle eastern names was
an effort to provoke such an action. However, a search for information
about sporging of usenet groups will show that lots of groups having
nothing to do with fireworks are sporged. The sporgers pick up names
and e-mail addresses from regular posters and post under them as well
as under fictitious ones. Check your own Google posting history. You
may be surprised!

Why is anyone's guess. It also seems like it is turned off and on with
no discernable pattern. We had a brief respite and now it is back. I
believe the MI5 stuff comes from a different source than do the
gibberish posts with the middle eastern names.

On Nov 18, 3:45 pm, james_kai...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Mike, I agree. There are two very different sporge origins, MI5 and
and the other one. The MI5 posts impact almost all newsgroups, but the
gibberish posts, at least from what I see, impact primarily
rec.pyrotecnics. Why this is becomes a very large question in my
mind.

My guess is that is is some sort of a vendetta, perpetrated by someone
whose posts were either ignored or resulted in some sort of a
perceived insult from other posters, someone on the verge of
insanity. Posters who are experienced hackers have the knowledge to
do this.

Consider that hackers, in general, are all individuals that are
psychologically right on the edge of insanity. Their lives have
degenerated to the point where the only thing in life that has value
to them is their computer. Most are seriously misguided and unstable,
but definitely not stupid. The perp in this case is stupid, because he/
she must resort to the explotation of methods created by much sharper
minds than theirs. In this case this perp is exploiting a method that
was devised close to 10 years ago, so he/she lacks any reasonable
degree of creativity. If you bother to hang around the hacker
oriented newsites for any amount of time (start with alt.2600 and go
from there), the numerous methods for disrupting a newsgroup or even
someone's email address will be obvious -- No Skill Required
whatsoever. What is sad is that most of the participants in the hacker
type newsgroups are responsible professionals, for whom these methods
are little more than a mental exercise.

Curiously, alt.2600 is also infested by MI5 splonge! Still, here is a
link to a typical alt.2600 style post:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.2600/browse_thread/thread/2b384985ec19949e#b5de490a4d38a6a6

Also, and oddly enough, several of the alt. newsgroups appear
dedicated to the destruction of the Internet for no reason other than
to play a game. It seems to me that this is more than a bit self-
destrucive, but that's possibly the nature of insanity.

Harry C.





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