1. Forum
  2. Usenet
  3. NEWS.SOFTWARE.READERS

  • [OT] What's up with comp.editors

    From Stan Brown@21:1/5 to All on Thu Nov 23 10:08:06 2023
    For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
    hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
    lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1 characters.

    Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?


    --
    Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
    Shikata ga nai...

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Stan Brown on Thu Nov 23 18:28:50 2023
    Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:

    For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
    hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
    lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1 >characters.

    Yes. "?" can be used to substitute for a character that's not in the
    character set being used.

    Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

    Absolutely. You may consider it a denial of service attack. They are in
    a variety of Asian languages, although some are in English, and many of
    the spam articles trigger Google's BASE64 encoding. A few are encoded in Quoted-Printable. Yes, they do tend to use encoded-word on Subject.

    For several months, there have been massive spam attacks through Google
    Groups into various newsgroups. Ray and several others have been issuing
    NoCeMs as a spam countermeasure. I thought individual.net was processing
    them. If not, you could request it.

    Note that volunteers are analyzing the spam and adapting as the spammers
    are adapting to the countermeasures. Therefore, even with NoCeMs being processed, you'll still see spam that hasn't yet been countered.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Thu Nov 23 19:48:35 2023
    Am 23.11.2023 um 10:08:06 Uhr schrieb Stan Brown:

    Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

    Most likely spam from Google Groups.

    Can you implement a filter ruleset on your client?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Ralph Fox@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Fri Nov 24 08:30:12 2023
    On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 19:48:35 +0100, Marco Moock wrote:

    Am 23.11.2023 um 10:08:06 Uhr schrieb Stan Brown:

    Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

    Most likely spam from Google Groups.

    Can you implement a filter ruleset on your client?


    The Usenet Improvement Project website has information on filtering
    Google Groups posts in the OP's client, Gravity. <http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/filters_ex3.html>


    --
    Kind regards
    Ralph Fox

    Betere byþ oft feðre þonne oferfeðre.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Stan Brown@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Thu Nov 23 16:35:34 2023
    On Thu, 23 Nov 2023 18:28:50 -0000 (UTC), Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote:

    For a couple of weeks now, every time I fire up Gravity it shows
    hundreds or thousands of unread messages in comp.editors. The subject
    lines are mostly question marks, which I assume means non-ISO-8859-1 >characters.

    Yes. "?" can be used to substitute for a character that's not in the character set being used.

    Does anyone know: Is this some sort of weird DDOS attack, or what?

    Absolutely. You may consider it a denial of service attack. They are in
    a variety of Asian languages, although some are in English, and many of
    the spam articles trigger Google's BASE64 encoding. A few are encoded in Quoted-Printable. Yes, they do tend to use encoded-word on Subject.

    For several months, there have been massive spam attacks through Google Groups into various newsgroups. Ray and several others have been issuing NoCeMs as a spam countermeasure. I thought individual.net was processing them. If not, you could request it.

    Note that volunteers are analyzing the spam and adapting as the spammers
    are adapting to the countermeasures. Therefore, even with NoCeMs being processed, you'll still see spam that hasn't yet been countered.

    Thanks for the info, Adam. That would explain why today Gravity said
    there were several thousand new ones on the server, but only a dozen
    or so appeared when I opened the newsgroup. I don't have a rule to
    kill Google Groups postings, because some worthwhile posters use GG;
    but I do have a rule to kill posts with garbage characters in the
    subject. That would be why the dozen or so had already been marked as
    read.

    --
    Stan Brown, Tehachapi, California, USA https://BrownMath.com/
    Shikata ga nai...

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)