The word sporgery is a portmanteau of the two words spam and forgery, coined by Tilman Hausherr. Sporgery is the act of posting a very large number of forged USENET articles into an Internet newsgroup with the intent of making that newsgroup unreadable unless one uses a newsgroup filter.
Origins in alt.religion.scientology
The word was coined in the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology, an Internet newsgroup where people discuss the controversial belief system of Scientology. One of the various actions of the "war" between Scientology and the Internet involved various individuals who had posted more than one million forged newsgroup articles to the newsgroup, using the message headers (valid names and e-mail addresses) of articles written by Scientology critics and other legitimate posters, and appending to those headers the bodies of other articles harvested from racist newsgroups. The result was to flood the newsgroup with over one million forged articles that made the other posters appear to be hateful "racist bigots." (Critics accused Scientology of planning and conducting the spam flood, but the organization denied this.)
The apparent intent of this attack was to render the newsgroup useless for discussion and criticism of Scientology. Another purpose may have been to dead agent the posters so that people would not take their criticisms of Scientology seriously. (The expression "dead agent" is Scientology terminology for undermining a critic's credibility. [1])
At the peak of this attack, the attackers had a total of six computers posting sporgeries into the newsgroup, dumping into USENET an average of 170 megabytes in 44,075 articles every month. From October of 1998 to September of 1999, a total of 1,462,390,911 sporgery bytes were detected: that figure does not include the sporgery which was canceled (deleted from USENET) before it could propagate. Just before the sporgery attack ended, the sporgery resulted in more than 90% of the newsgroup's traffic.
To accomplish the sporgery attack, the spammers used several methods to acquire Internet access. Open NNTP servers were used when available, to such an extent that a great many had to be closed by their owners. When open NNTP servers eventually became scarce, open proxies were used. These proxies allowed Scientology partisans to use someone else's computer hardware to sporge. Due to lax security in a proxy software called "WinGate," many such proxies were abused. Since that time, open proxies have become the most popular resource for other spammers to abuse, eclipsing open relays and other insecure hosts.
The third method used to acquire newsgroup posting access, and the method that was used the most, was to use volunteers to go out and purchase Internet dialup access from an Internet Service Provider using a false name and address, and using cash or a money order. These persons were given a large amount of cash and air fare to fly to a city specifically to acquire Internet access for later use in sporging. One such volunteer later left Scientology and confessed to performing this task, giving the names of the Scientology staff members who were allegedly in charge of the sporgery project.
The sporgery attack against a.r.s. ended a few months after the name and address of one of the perpetrators was acquired by one of the victims, at which time the United State's Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved. No indictments were made, and nor were there any arrests.
Other sporgery attacks
Since the emergence of this technique of disrupting a newsgroup, a few other groups have been targeted this way. One, news.admin.net-abuse.email, is used for discussion of spamming and other email abuse problems. A person or persons using the pseudonym "Hipcrime" have attacked this and other groups with sporgeries, usually nonsense or Dissociated Press text posted under random names of legitimate posters. [1]
