Oops! Spammers use Allpar

A spammer has used Allpar to send thousands of unwanted messages via the old news systems’ Send to a Friend function.

I noticed a high CPU utilization today and checked to see what was wrong; seeing a high mail server load made me very suspicious and the logs showed the problem. I immediately deleted the offending code and restarted the mail system, deleting all messages in progress. 

This may result in subscribers to our mailing lists not receiving announcements for a while. 

I apologize to everyone impacted and will be going through the system and deleting old code as soon as I can.

Update: it appears the spammers were only operating for around one hour. This is quite fortunate because I had not touched a computer since Wednesday afternoon.