The spam problem started in 1993 w/ Robert McElwaine spamming all of the groups relentlessly with crackpot content from WUSTL. WUSTL did nothing for a long time because he sued them (and won) when they stopped him putting ads in the campus paper.
I developed a zero day email amplification attack and launched it on a Friday; it worked better than expected and filled the disk on their VAX and the whole campus was down until the next Tuesday.
They couldn’t prove I did it but the central computing facility found a pretence, deleted my account and gave me an empty suntape that allegedly held my files. I still had accounts at the physics and EE departments so it was not a big loss.
McElwaine was out.
The recorded history of USENET spam started in April 1994 with the law firm of Canter and Siegel and their Green Card Lottery scam. I was involved in that too and did not get in trouble for that one but anti-spam activism got me a date with the JA, trips to the Dominican Republic and Brazil, other misadventures and a lot more spam.
I developed a zero day email amplification attack and launched it on a Friday; it worked better than expected and filled the disk on their VAX and the whole campus was down until the next Tuesday.
They couldn’t prove I did it but the central computing facility found a pretence, deleted my account and gave me an empty suntape that allegedly held my files. I still had accounts at the physics and EE departments so it was not a big loss.
McElwaine was out.
The recorded history of USENET spam started in April 1994 with the law firm of Canter and Siegel and their Green Card Lottery scam. I was involved in that too and did not get in trouble for that one but anti-spam activism got me a date with the JA, trips to the Dominican Republic and Brazil, other misadventures and a lot more spam.