"Burr" wrote in message
...
Does anyone know if anything is being done to stop this
mess? I haven't heard a word on the news about this one.


This is a big attack on usenet users, but I doubt the news media will pay
much attention unless it gets out into the general public. Usenet is a tiny
corner of the internet nowadays, and most computer users are completely
unaware of it. So the reporters are unlikely to get a first hand sample of
the spam attack, the general public doesn't start asking why the hell they
have all this spam in their mailboxes and the Internet itself doesn't slow
down a noticeable amount.

There's been some speculation on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email
that these worms are designed to be taken over by a spammer who will later
send out thousands of spam e-mails from an infected machine. In this
particular case, the worm may have been targeted at newsgroups in which
there are technically oriented users who trace the spam back to an ISP and
report the abuse. Seems plausible, but I'm just repeating someone else's
speculation.

Frank Dresser