newsgroups "spam"?

[OldNick]

So. The short of it. Are you able to / interested in dealing with newsgroup spam? This seems a newish phenomenon in this volume, certainly on the groups I use.

My problem is with stuff being sent to newsgroups. There are many headers containg various bestial, sexual, torture etc etc references. These headers have attachments, or references, to worms or viruses.

I foolishly opened one, knowing what it was, and it gave me "worms"and spyware. It may have collapsed my registry. I am not sure about that, as I had dealt with it way before that happened. When I ran the virus checker that had finally caught up, it showed me clean.

It _could_ prevent me from regeditting when it was active!

It should not have. I had virus watch, malware watch and firewall. None of them caught the stuff! This was when the messages were over a week old, and I had been trying to bring them to the attention of the relevent software companies, to no avail.

I have been trying to get their attention since, with little or slow success.

I have emailed the apparent ISPs of the email addresses that are _supposed_ to be sending the spam, with little success except standard replies. Pat pat there there we will fix it etcetc. Most of the spam was coming from one ISP.

I have emailed the "senders" under an assumed but real email address. They bounced. It was worth a try, if they were mined addresses.

On the newsgroups, I have simply been told to ignore them and more or less politely been told to stop bothering people.

[Merlyn]

You can use Spamcop to report usenet spam also. I do it all the time.

Just copy the complete headers and manually paste them into the reporting screen.

[OldNick]

Merlyn

My sincer apologies for not replying. I was having trouble doing so, and had to fix that.

If I post newsgroup spam onto this site, what can SpamCop actually _do_ about it?

I need to read more inof, I think. BUt AFAICS, SpamCop gives out email blacklists. But newsgroup spam gets around this. So how would SpamCop actually take action about the reports?

I have been emailing reports on the email address I received when I logged in to report via email. But I have had no acknowledgement. SO I am not sure if I am even lodging correctly.

Thanks for any help

[Spambo]

SpamCop doesn't "take action", but it does prepare spam reports that are sent to the NNTP source of the Usenet spam. It is the place of the receiving abuse department to take action based on their TOS.

SC won't report the spams to web hosts of spamvertised URLs in Usenet spam so if you're wanting to 'hit the spammers where it hurts' you'll need to send manual reports. Although SC won't prepare these spam reports you can paste the spamvertised URL into the parsing box and the parser will give you the address it would use IF it were sending reports. You can then take that address and send manual reports.

[OldNick]

Thanks for the reply

OK. I need to digest that parsing box and reporting screen bit.

So posting them here will not help?

My problem is that on the newsgroups, _nobody_ bothers. I get abused for trying to drum up support. So I will be one silly little report.

Until recently, there was not this problem of virus-ridden, foul-titled posts every day. I am wondering if it needs addressing?

[Spambo]

No, posting them here won't do any good. Only the abuse departments responsible for the source of the spam and for hosting the spamvertised URL can actually do anything.

Although it is always better if you can get a number of regulars of the newsgroup to complain it's not "hopless" if you're the only one reporting from that newsgroup. Spammers rarely spam only one newsgroup so you should have company with others who report the spammer's actions in other newsgroups.