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Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.[1][2]
Sporgery resembles IRC flooding, which is also intended to disrupt a forum. However, sporgery is not merely disruptive but also deceptive or libellous because it involves falsifying the headers of objectionable posts so they appear to originate from newsgroup regulars. The purpose is not merely to jam the forum, but also to sully the reputations of its regular users by falsely signing their names to offensive posts.[3]: 139
According to internet security company ESET, sporgery was one of the vulnerabilities of the Usenet model which "probably contributed to a decline in [its] general use".[4]
- ^ Poulsen, Kevin (May 6, 1999). "Attack of the Robotic Poets (page 2)". G4TV. Archived from the original on September 26, 2007. (Page 1)
- ^ Rutter, Daniel (September 16, 1999). "Gibbering clones the future of Usenet?" (Reprint with annotation). Australian IT. Retrieved March 16, 2007.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
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esetwas invoked but never defined (see the help page).