Info on the recent spamming to this list

Glenn S. Tenney (mailto:tenney@NETCOM.COM)
Tue, 30 May 1995 02:09:07 -0800 

Message-ID:  <v02120c14abf09dc1de04@[199.35.142.155]>
Date:         Tue, 30 May 1995 02:09:07 -0800
From: "Glenn S. Tenney" <mailto:tenney@NETCOM.COM>
Subject:      Info on the recent spamming to this list
To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L


I sent email to the postmaster (that's what you should do instead of
complaining to the list here) and got the following note.  I've edited it
down a bit to not waste the bandwidth to the entire list.  If you want more
info you can send email to mailto:postmaster@rtd.com.
Glenn


- - - - -
Date: Mon, 29 May 1995 22:40:04 -0700
From: mailto:mark@nin.com (Mark Beeson)
Subject: NOTICE: Lifestyle Health Spam INFO part 2


It is currently 2PM MST, Thursday May 25 1995, one day after the huge
spam of Usenet by mailto:trasoff@rtd.com.  Things have quieted down a bit around
the office here, and I now have time to post a followup to my original
post (which was made yesterday morning in a harried rush to get information
to people on Usenet).


If you don't already know who I am, let me (re)introduce myself.  I am
Mark Beeson, Usenet News Administrator for RTD Systems & Networking Inc.
RTD is a small Internet Access Provider based in Tucson, Arizona.  My
e-mail address is mailto:mark@rtd.com, and all correspondence related to this
incident should be sent to me.


First of all, I'd like to apologize for the broken cancel messages sent
out by myself.  I realize, now, that quite a few of you got bombarded
with about 1500 mail messages that were generated because of me incorrectly
cancelling the messages.  Please understand that my state of mind at
10PM that night - not pleasant.


Secondly, let me thank everyone who sent a note of support or thanks
relating to this endeavor.  I can't respond to them all, but know that
you folks brightened an otherwise very bad day.


Alright, I can now tell everyone what I know about what happened.  Someone
else here at RTD called up the Lifestyle Health company yesterday morning
and asked them what the deal was.


The people at Lifestyle Health aren't to blame for anything other than
ignorance.  The story is as follows:


The Lifestyle Health company were dissatisfied at how their commercial
web pages were performing (they have web pages on Primenet, another
Internet Access Provider based in Phoenix AZ), so they contacted
CyberSell (Inc?), hoping to post advertisements in a few, pertinent,
newsgroups.  CyberSell is, as you know, run by Laurence Canter and
Martha Siegel, famous "Green Card Lawyers".


CyberSell told the Lifestyle Health company a statement to the effect
of "get us a shell account on an Internet Access Provider and we'll
take care of it."  Lifestyle Health was not aware of what they were
getting into.


We were contacted a few days ago, I'm told, by a Nina Trasoff, an
employee for this Lifestyle Health company.  She was in charge of
getting the shell account.  Once that was done, Lifestyle Health
contacted CyberSell again.


mailto:trasoff@rtd.com logged in at approximately 7PM and executed a perl
script which, while I can't post here because it is "Copyrighted
(C) 1995 Laurence Canter", did the following:


   - Took a text file "./news" which contained newsgroups in it,
     three or four per line, always beginning with "control,"
     (so it could hit groups that our news server didn't carry).
   - Generated a random userid.
   - Executed a while loop that read all of the newsgroups,
     opened a direct pipe into inews, and posted a text file
     "./message" to as many newsgroups as it could.