Another attack on alt.religion.scientology

[Rich Burroughs <richieb@teleport.com>]

Someone has launched another attack on the Usenet group
alt.religion.scientology.  In the last five days, hundreds of
messages have been posted to a.r.s. in what many presume to be
yet another attempt by CoS to stifle criticism and shut down
the newsgroup.

The first poster used the return address "Chris Maple" <chrismpl@
a.crl.com>, and made use of a mail gateway at Yale.  The Yale
admins closed the gateway to the spammer, but several hundred
posts had already made it through (I got at least 400 here).  I
believe the Yale admin said that 800 more attempts were made to
post to a.r.s. after the gateway had been closed.  Since then,
"Chris Maple" has been followed by several other vertical spammers,
all posting similar material, even formatted the same -- same
intro and URLs at the end.

As each new vertical spammer shows up we contact their ISP,
but by the time anything happens we have several hundred more
messages.  The group has been flooded with spam for about five
days straight.

While there is no direct evidence, AFAIK, that CoS is responsible
for the attack, it is consistent with their ongoing attempts to
silence their critics, including lawsuit, harassment by private
investigators, rmgrouping a.r.s., and (presumably) shutting down
hacktic.  Please let others know about what's happening, and feel
free to repost this message in appropriate forums.  



Thanks,

Rich

______________________________________________________________________
Rich Burroughs  richieb@teleport.com  http://www.teleport.com/~richieb
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