From: IN%"richieb@teleport.com" "Rich Burroughs" 28-MAY-1996 19:12:55.39

In the last week, there have been several thousand (and rapidly approaching 10,000!) short posts swamping the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology (a.r.s.) by a person or persons unknown. They are coming from several accounts, most of them forged or bogus, and when the account is closed by its site administrator based on complaints, the flood begins anew elsewhere. In at least one instance a mail-to-news gateway has been used, necessitating the administrator to close all posting to a.r.s. That one gateway has received, last we heard, 886 attempted posts by the spammer within a 28 hour period (which fortunately never reached their intended destination -- but thousands of others have.)

3) The use of semi-anonymous "throw-away" accounts somewhat follows the same pattern used recently to cancel posts containing portions of CoS' "secret" scriptures, and which used the boiler-plate statement "Cancelled due to copyright infringement" as the justification for the clearly illegal cancels.

b) Kill files work by finding posts having certain identifiable attributes in the header or message body, such as the From: address -- but as the spam on a.r.s. shows, we've got a moving target that will resist kill files. Any organization with enough money can keep getting throw-away accounts that cannot be traced to the organization. They can also alter

I am curious as to what systems these throw-away accounts are on; they would appear to be good output systems for ephemeral remailer endpoints. Admittedly, I suspect that this will take ecash remailers unless they're all through systems like aol.com that accept credit cards with inadequate verification (from what I know, check digit(s) only). -Allen