Thursday, August 16, 2007

Sporge Flooding Usenet

Apparently, many usenet discussion groups are undergoing sporge flooding attacks recently. “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,” Wikipedia’s article on the subject explains. Tomi, who sent this in, says “this might be of interested to Google users, because some newbie Google users may think Google Groups is under attack when it’s actually many Usenet newsgroups that are under attack at the moment.” Questions on the issue already popped up in threads like this one.

At the rec.crafts.metalworking usenet group, there’s an example of a sporge flood scheduling message:

Subject: rec.crafts.metalworking scheduled for sporge flood

Sporge flooding of rec.crafts.metalworking will commence in a few hours.

This will render rec.crafts.metalworking useless. For an example, see Sci.Crypt.

Supernews filters out this sporgery spam. Get a better Usenet experience. Sign up for our risk-free trial today!

https://www.supernews.com/signup

In a reply to this post, Don Nichols writes, “this is apparently a joe job, not anything really from supernews.”

[Thanks Tomi H.!]

Sporge Flooding Usenet by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

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