Here Alan talks about an attack using a "version bomb" on an ISP he disagrees with.

At the end he talks about "real spammer heads on real pikes". This is a highly inciteful and violent statement. Unfortunately, "spammers" to Alan Brown is anyone he doesn't like. 


X-X-Sender: alanb@Aurora
Message-ID:  
Date:         Mon, 8 Jul 2002 09:21:30 -0400
Sender: Spam Prevention Discussion List 
From: Alan Brown 
Subject: Re: SPAM, BLOCK: Get Your USA Green Card - Now Online (fwd)
X-To:         Joel Rubin 
To: SPAM-L@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Joel Rubin wrote:

> Of course green card lottery scamspams are a blast from the past. Many
> people first became aware of spam issues when Cantor and Siegel
> flooded their ads to at least 2000 newsgroups.


The "big spam" was 5000+ postings to 2 groups apiece (one mainstream and
one regional for each posting).


The reason for doing this is pretty obvious - a lot of the regional
groups weren't carried on the idirect servers. They'd obtained lists of
all known regional groups and matched them with a group having wider
distribution in order to ensure the messages showed up where they
weren't wanted.

The spam run was blasted out in 2-3 hours and was big enough to cause
Usenet systems around the world to shut down for up to 3 days in some
cases and gave the entire system hiccups which lasted over a month. This
was back in the days when newsfeeds could run comfortably on a 28k8
modem and often did.
The "big spam" was at least the 5th spam run C&S had done and idirect
was the 4th ISP they'd spammed from. They'd hit my local groups
(manawatu.* and nz.*) 5 times that I recall, resulting in a version bomb
from my neck of the woods after one of the ISPs responded that spamming
wasn't illegal and they wouldn't be terminating the account, followed by
a second spam run a day or so later.

A good chunk of the 250,000 replies they got at idirect (and were suing
to obtain) were sendsys replies...


Lawrence Cantor's reply to spamming complaints at the time comes down to
"What we are doing is legal and I am going to find you and sue you for
defamation if you continue complaining" -
Message-ID: <940411.213649.0q1.rusnews.w165w@nbi.com>

It just goes to show that legal threats against spam complainers is far
from a new phenomenon - The posting above is from 1994 and was about a
complaint made when they were on Netcom (spamrun #2, iirc)
AB, a strong fan of real spammer heads on real pikes.

Well, "real spammer heads on real pikes" is about as inciteful and threatening as one can get.

What's really important about Brown's message is the acknowledgement of abuse he conducted on an ISP:

They'd hit my local groups (manawatu.* and nz.*) 5 times that I recall, resulting in a version bomb from my neck of the woods after one of the ISPs responded that spamming wasn't illegal and they wouldn't be terminating the account, followed by a second spam run a day or so later.

Lets take this apart:

  • Brown makes a complaint about commercial post on Usenet.
  • His complaint and demands are denied--commercial posting isn't illegal or even unusual.
  • Then that ISP is hit with a "Version Bomb"
  • Brown knows what attack they were hit with.

    My, but that's interestng. This is why law enforcement always holds back some details of the crime. If the criminal slips and reveals something they shouldn't know, they know they have their suspect.

    Some nits

    Actually, Cantor was correct: What they were doing was legal and lawful. It wasn't even unusual on usenet, but most advertising was done to technical people, by companies like DEC. Second, it wasn't the case that they just sent 5000 posting to be annoying. There was the little issue of the cancel-bot war: Zealots canceled the ad postings, so Cantor and Seigel reposted them. The mess that was caused by the little "war" was the fault of the anti-spammers conducting the abuse. The zealots doing the canceling actually had no authority to do the canceling, and were in fact exploiting a security flaw in the Usenet News system. Many news admins blocked the unauthorized cancels, and this resulted in the 5000 postings showing up "uncanceled", much to the cancel'ers delight.

    Another point of history: The internet was non-commercial for the first years as a DARPA project. To be connected, companies and universities had to state a research purpose. That changed in 1993 when the Internet went "commercial". However, the Usenet never had any non-commercial notion to it. While it may be that some gave free connections. Most others didn't. In those days, a 9600 baud leased line was expensive. Dialup was expensive and was billed per-minute. Long distance cost more than 10 cents per minute. Connections were slow: 300 or 1200 baud was not uncommon, going to 14.400 baud by 1991.(or if you could by top-of-the-line, there were19.9kb Telebit proprietary modems optimized for UUCP). UUnet was started by Rick Adams as a UUCP hub, to exchange files, email, and news.

    And last, News is a particularly efficent medium for advertising. A cross-posted message is not displayed again after it is read. Even more efficient, the message is only transferred once to each system, no matter how many users there are. Further, News already had a sophisticated filter system to screen out posting from people readers weren't interested in. If not for the zealots, Cantor and Siegel's message would have been read once by each person. Probably, they would have gotten little response for their green card offer, and moved into some other mode of business if they had simply been ignored. Had they persisted, they would have ended up in users "kill files". But there weren't many potential candidates for their green card service on Usenet.