The word was coined in the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology: an Internet newsgroup where people discuss the controversial belief system of Scientology. When the word was coined, the Scientology business had posted more than 1,000,000 forged newsgroup articles to the newsgroup, using the message headers (valid names and e-mail addresses) of articles written by civil and human rights activists, and appending to those headers the bodies of other articles harvested from racist hate group newsgroups. The result was to flood the newsgroup with over one million forged articles that made the civil and human rights activists appear to be hateful racist bigots. The intent was to "dead agent" the civil and human rights activists so that people would not take their criticisms of Scientology Inc.'s crimes and human rights abuses seriously.
At its most busiest, Scientology Inc. had a total of six computers posting sporgeries into the newsgroup, dumping into USENET an average of 170,000,000 bytes 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, Scientology Inc. 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 gateways were used. These gateways allowed Scientology Inc. to use someone else's computer hardware to sporge. Due to lax security in a gateway software called "WinGate," many such gateways were abused.
The third method used by Scientology Inc. to acquire newsgroup posting access, and the method that was used the most, was to use Scientology 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 Scientologists would be 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 fled the sinister business and confessed to performing this task for Scientology Inc., giving the names of the Scientology staff members who were 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 no arrests.
Unfortunately, sporgery became popular enough to spawn copy-cat sporgers, who used the technique (albeit much diminished in time, money, and effort than Scientology Inc.) to attack other newsgroups.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump