Subject: Canned Message

From: Linda Emerson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 20:26:48 -0800 (PST)

What program generates the following message & why?

"Reposting article removed by rogue canceller"

Earlier this week, there were a number of "cancelled messages" in my
inbox; then during the week I noticed a number of messages that contained
this message as the first line.  Just curious.

...			:			     ...
	               	:: 
    Linda Emerson     \~~~~~/      Caffe' Sumatra
  [email-masked]    C\___/   Twain Harte, California

---

From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 01:15:11 -0500

>From: Linda Emerson <[email-masked]>
>Date: 27 Sep 1996 21:25:41 -0700

>this message as the first line.  Just curious.

That was Chris Lewis, resurrecting as many article as possible. comp.mail.pine
(and its mirror, the pine-info mailing list) were hit by the rogue canceller.

Excerpts from his article:

Over the weekend, someone using sophisticated cancel-generating software
posted nearly 30,000 cancels forged in the name of the original posters.
The cancels purport to be legitimate spam/advisory cancellations, but,
it is clear that they weren't.  It appears that someone ran a program
that simply listened into inbound Usenet on a server, and generated
cancels for every article it saw in the groups it was listening to.  The
cancels were labeled with "tags" indicating why they were cancelled, but
these tags were simply labels assigned to the groups the program
was listening to.  If it was a alt.sex group, it got "twatcancel".
If it was a comp.* group, it got "geekcancel".

In essence, then, in the jargon of news.admin.net-abuse.misc, a Usenet-wide
UDP (cancel every article in usenet) was operating for a time.

As of this date, then, 18304 articles were resurrected from 27474 cancels.

<end excerpts>

To follow the discussion, read Chris Lewis's full article, with the subject
"Massive cancel attack report" in news.admin.net-abuse.announce or 
news.admin.net-abuse.misc. The discussion takes place in the latter newsgroup.