From: Jasper
Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Time: 07:55:01 PM
To All – You can see by the spam we’ve left of this board and the “Test” posts (which were spam posts we cut the guts out of in our background program) that we are under spam attack. What you might not know is the extent to which this has been happening on our archived boards for years. You might not know how it affects legitimate attempts to post here and attempts to find information about the Bundy murders on search engines that used to lead directly to Smartfellows because that information could be found nowhere else. …………… The mountains of garbage you might have seen that dominated archived boards and infused legitimate posts were only ant hills compared to the garbage the spammer dumped into our background program that you can’t see but search engines can. There were hundreds of thousands of them at various times and places on the site. They took up huge chunks of our allotted space. They destabilized our current discussion boards and they would have taken over our site completely for all practical purposes if we hadn’t taken timely measures to track them down and get rid of them. …………… That’s only part of the story. The system is set up in a way that you can’t take out the malicious junk without running the risk of doing more damage to ourselves than the spammer was doing to us. The spammer is playing to that weakness in the system. That means we are not dealing with a random mischief – maker attacking us for fun in his spare time. This guy is systematic, knowledgeable, and seriously dedicated to sabotaging everything we attempt to do on the discussion boards and everything we’ve done on the entire site since we went online. ……………And that’s still only part of the story. The closest we’ve been able to track this guy is to a company in suite in a building in Marina Del Ray, California (no kidding). It’s not a secret. The company even has a website http://www.iana.org/abuse/ ……………On the bright side, our spammer is so sure he cannot be traced that he is making mistakes in his attack patterns that are extremely helpful to us. While he can choose when, where and how to spam, we can choose when, where and how to take out whatever he puts in. The mere fact that he (she or they) is so active and persistent can and will be used to our advantage until we can figure out the best way to stop him (her or them). In the end, it doesn’t matter who is doing it if we can be certain of WHY it is being done. We now have enough to be sure of that and to prove it when the time is right. …………. Meanwhile, we can expect more spam attacks on this board and wherever the spammer can get in (by his design or ours). Be patient. Ultimately this spam campaign works for us because nobody would go through all that trouble to derail a train that was on the wrong track. If he is smart enough to understand the long range implications of that fact he would appear to be either too arrogant or too desperate to stop. –Jasper