A friend of mine is, at least for a while, the Unix sysadmin at the small liberal arts college near Philadelphia that he and I both attended. Today, he noticed a spammer taking advantage of the wireless network that that college provides for its students' use to send spam to students at other colleges and universities.
Here is that friend's description of the events.
Some choice quotes, reposted here with my friend's permission:
i happened to be in the middle of email correspondence with the mail admin for the university of washington about a seperate virus-related instance, who then replied saying that they were getting hammered by the same machine,
[...]
at this point, the machine was still on the network, so i decided to take a passing investigation to see if we could track down the owner of the machine to force them to get their computer fixed (we were still pretty sure this was being caused by a virus at this time). there wasn't any identifiable characteristics about this machine, so i figured i would send it a message that would get displayed on the desktop of the machine (this is called a “winpopup” message, and can be sent by remote administrators and other clever individuals). unfortunately, the machine was set up to not accept such remote messages. but it did happen to be sharing its “my documents” folder on the network to anyone interested enough to connect (that is, no user/pass required).
[...]
some of these documents were listed with a phone number at which niche wave media could be contacted, so i called the number. the phone conversation was roughly: 2004/03/02, 10:30 AM
m: “hello?”
s: “hi, my name is sean [redacted], a unix systems administrator at [redacted] college. I'm trying to reach a michael hagan of niche wave media.”
m: (uncomfortable pause) … “uh, this isn't michael, i got this phone from somebody else”.
s: “okay, would you happen to have a number at which i could reach michael then? I'm trying to get in touch with him”
m: “um, could i take a message? i could, um, tell him you called”
s: “sure. we're pretty sure he's on our campus and we'd like to get in touch with him”
m: “what was your name again?”
s: “sure, it's …”
<EOT>
If you recognize either of these people:
please kick them in the balls for us. PLZKTNX.
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