North American Network Operators Group

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We've been hit by the spammers, please have mercy

  • From: Dana Hudes
  • Date: Mon May 05 13:18:38 1997

Folks,
Over the weekend someone decided to use our (Graphnet/globalis.net)
mail server for sending spam. We are in the process of dealing with
this and some internal network outages all at once. FYI, our mail server
is running the very latest Solaris 2.5.1 + patches but the software
is Netscape Mail server which replaces Sendmail with its very own.  I
thought they claimed it could not be used for transit mail but
apparently either the claim was false or I misunderstood.

Our small staff is strained to capacity working on these issues this
monday morning. Please, stop sending mail to [email protected] and
attacking us
You are making the problem worse by flooding us with mail.
Please do not blackhole us we have never been a problem before with
this and thought we had taken preventative measures. Obviously these
measures failed but we are working with Netscape to understand why their
sendmail version allowed this to happen.  

Don't shoot me, I'm one of the good guys....
We want to take action with law enforcement to find and prosecute the
spammer  for denial of service attacks and theft of services.  Pointers
to appropriate law enforcement agencies appreciated, also tips on
tracking the source down. Ditto applicable NJ and US statutes. I assume
not every spam comes from cyberpromo using one's server for transit
mail.

Dana Hudes
Senior Network Engineer
Graphnet
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