[The following is copyright material from the 3/18/96 issue of TIME,
reposted by permission. My experience suggests that a little bit of listserve
security, like a confirmation message, might go a long way. ped]
 
I've Been Spammed!
 
An insidious E-mail bomb targets the President, two hacker magazines and a
TIME senior editor
 
The first sign that something was wrong came Sunday afternoon, when I
logged on to the Internet to check my weekend E-mail and found that someone
had enrolled me in a Barry Manilow fan club, a Mercedes owners' discussion
group, a Fiji Islands appreciation society, and 103 other Internet mailing
lists I'd never heard of. I knew from experience that any one of these
lists can generate 50 messages a day. To avoid a deluge of junk E-mail, I
painstakingly unsubscribed from all 106--even Barry Manilow's--only to log
on Monday morning and discover I'd been subscribed overnight to 1,700 more.
My file of unread E-mail had swelled to 16 megabytes, and was growing by
the minute.
 
I'd heard about "spam"--Internet jargon for machine-generated junk
mail--and over the years I've received my share of E-mail chain letters,
get-rich-quick pitches and cheesy magazine ads. But I had never experienced
anything like this: a parade of mail that just got bigger and bigger, like
Mickey's brooms in Fantasia. Not only was I getting hundreds of
subscription notices, but I was receiving copies of every piece of mail
posted to those lists. By Monday the E-mail was pouring in at the rate of
four a minute, 240 an hour, 5,760 a day.
 
The rest of the week was what my parents used to call a learning
experience. The first thing I learned was how little I knew about Internet
mailing lists. They don't get as much press as the more glamorous World
Wide Web, but these lists are every bit as active and in some ways much
more satisfying. Subscribing to a good mailing list is like entering into
heartfelt correspondence with world-class letter writers. Every day brings
a fresh crop of E-mail from people who share your particular obsessions, be
they garden herbs or firearms or the novels of Anne Rice. And if you ever
tire of their daily epistles, you simply unsubscribe--that is, if you
remember to save the sign-off instructions.
 
The next thing I learned was that I was not alone. Thirty-five other
Internet addresses were targeted last week, ranging from the prestigious
[log in to unmask] gov to the evocative [log in to unmask] The
victims included the New York Times' chief Silicon Valley reporter, two
leading hacker magazines, a couple of interns at mtv and a man who once ran
a Hell's Angels computer bulletin board. Gene Steinberg, a free-lance
writer from Scottsdale, Arizona, is convinced he made the hit list because
he publicly defended America Online on a Usenet newsgroup called
alt.aol.sucks.
 
"This is clearly someone who's got too much time on his hands," says hacker
Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600 magazine, who got hit twice (in his
letters and articles mailboxes) and would have been struck a third time if
the perpetrator hadn't misspelled his name. Goldstein wrote a simple
program that canceled most of his subscriptions. "It's like stepping in dog
droppings," he says. "You change your shoes and get on with your day."
 
The rest of us are not so adept. The White House called in the Secret
Service. I had to get help from my local Internet provider, which managed
to reduce the flow to about 50 messages an hour. Who knows what's going on
at the congressional E-mailbox of Newt Gingrich, another victim. He has an
automated reply program that answers every E-mail that comes in. At week's
end, millions of his form letters were still being beamed to Internet users
all over the world.  --By Philip Elmer-DeWitt
 
Copyright Time Inc. 1996. All rights reserved.
 
--
Philip Elmer-DeWitt                                           [log in to unmask]
TIME Magazine                                          www.pathfinder.com