Sporgery

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Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery , coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr. [1] [2]

Contents

Sporgery resembles crapflooding, which is also intended to disrupt a forum. However, sporgery is not merely disruptive but also deceptive or libellous—it involves falsifying objectionable posts so they appear to come from newsgroup regulars. The purpose is not merely to jam the forum, but also to sully the reputations of its regular users by falsely signing their names to offensive posts.

Origins in alt.religion.scientology

The word sporgery was coined in the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, [3] an Internet newsgroup where people discuss the controversial belief system of Scientology. One of the various actions of the "war" between Scientology and the Internet involved various individuals who had posted more than a million forged newsgroup articles to the newsgroup, using the message headers (valid names and e-mail addresses) of articles written by Scientology critics and other legitimate posters, and appending to those headers the bodies of other articles harvested from racist newsgroups. The result was to flood the newsgroup with over one million forged articles that made the other posters appear to be hateful "racist bigots". (Critics accused Scientology of planning and conducting the spam flood, but the organization denied this.)[ citation needed ]

The apparent intent of this attack was to render the newsgroup useless for discussion and criticism of Scientology. Another purpose may have been to lower the reputation of the posters so that people would not take their criticisms of Scientology seriously.[ citation needed ]

At the peak of this attack, the attackers had six computers posting sporgeries into the newsgroup, dumping into USENET an average of 170 megabytes in 44,075 articles every month. From October 1998 to September 1999, 1,462,390,911 sporgery bytes were detected: that figure does not include the sporgery which was canceled (deleted from USENET) before it could propagate. Just before the sporgery attack ended, the sporgery resulted in more than 90% of the newsgroup's traffic.[ citation needed ]

To accomplish the sporgery attack, the spammers used several methods to acquire Internet access. Open NNTP servers were used when available, to such an extent that a great many had to be closed by their owners. When open NNTP servers eventually became scarce, open proxies were used. These proxies allowed Scientology partisans to use someone else's computer hardware to sporge. Because default security policies in many proxy server products at the time (late 1990s) were lax, many such proxies were available for abuse. Since that time, open proxies have become the most popular resource for other spammers to abuse, eclipsing open relays and other insecure hosts.

The third method used to acquire newsgroup posting access, and the method used the most, was to use volunteers to go out and buy Internet dialup access from an Internet service provider using a false name and address, and using cash or a money order. They were given a large amount of cash and air fare to fly to a city specifically to acquire Internet access for later use in sporging. One such volunteer, Tory Bezazian, later left Scientology and confessed to performing this task, giving the names of the Scientology staff members who were allegedly in charge of the sporgery project.

The sporgery attack against alt.religion.scientology ended a few months after the name and address of one of the perpetrators was acquired by one of the victims, at which time the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved. No indictments were made, nor were there any arrests.

Other sporgery attacks

Since the emergence of this technique of disrupting a newsgroup, a few other groups have been targeted this way. One, news.admin.net-abuse.email, is used for discussion of spamming and other email abuse problems. A person or persons using the pseudonym "Hipcrime" have attacked this and other groups with sporgeries, usually nonsense or Dissociated Press text posted under random names of legitimate posters. [4] Sporgery is also common in warez newsgroups.

See also

Related Research Articles

A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations using Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.

Spamming Unsolicited electronic messages, especially advertisements

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, or for any prohibited purpose. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.

Scientology and the Internet

There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the Church of Scientology began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The Church of Scientology is often accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The official church response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.

The newsgroup alt.religion.scientology is a Usenet newsgroup started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology, as well as the activities of the Church of Scientology, which claims exclusive intellectual property rights thereto and is viewed by many as a dangerous cult. The newsgroup has become the focal point of an aggressive battle known as Scientology versus the Internet, which has taken place both online and in the courts.

news.admin.net-abuse.email is a Usenet newsgroup devoted to discussion of the abuse of email systems, specifically through spam and similar attacks. According to a timeline compiled by Keith Lynch, news.admin.net-abuse.email was the first widely available electronic forum for discussing spam.

A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server provider.

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley wrote RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan O. Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.

alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup – a discussion group within the Usenet network – relating to human sexual activity. It was popular in the 1990s. An October 1993 survey by Brian Reid reported an estimated worldwide readership for the alt.sex newsgroup of 3.3 million, that being 8% of the total Usenet readership, with 67% of all Usenet "nodes" carrying the group. At that time, alt.sex had an estimated traffic of 2,300 messages per month.

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.

Newsreader (Usenet)

A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new articles. In addition to text-based articles, Usenet is also used to distribute binary files, generally in dedicated "binaries" newsgroups.

Joel Furr

Joel K. "Jay" Furr is a writer and software trainer notable as a Usenet personality in the early and mid-1990s.

Comment spam is a term referencing a broad category of spambot or spammer postings which abuse web-based forms to post unsolicited advertisements as comments on forums, blogs, wikis and online guestbooks. Related topics include:

Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic Usenet hierarchy, started in 1998. Unlike the original Usenet, it was peered only between "sound sites" and employed a system of rules to keep out spam.

Tilman Hausherr is a German citizen living in Berlin, Germany. Hausherr is well-known among critics of Scientology for his frequent Usenet posts and for maintaining a website critical of Scientology. Hausherr is also the author of a software utility, Xenu's Link Sleuth, which was praised in a 2002 PC Magazine article covering 70 web builder utilities.

Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments.

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. Since its inception, Usenet newsgroups have attracted a wide variety of people posting all manner of fact, fiction, theories, opinions, and beliefs. Some Usenet posters achieved a certain amount of fame and celebrity within Usenet circles because of their unusual, non-mainstream ideas, or because their writings and responses are considered especially humorous or bizarre.

Usenet Worldwide distributed Internet discussion system

Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that became widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996 and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers". The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups. Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd wrote in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.

References

  1. Attack of the Robotic Poets, ZDNet, by Kevin Poulsen, May 06, 1999
  2. Rutter, Daniel (16 September 1999). "Gibbering clones the future of Usenet?" (Reprint with annotation). Australian IT. Retrieved 2007-03-16.
  3. "Usenet, January 18, 1999, by Tilman Hausherr". Groups.google.de. 1999-01-18. Retrieved 2010-03-18.
  4. Archived June 30, 2003, at the Wayback Machine