When you connect a bunch of university students together on the internet, any meeting eventually devolves into a crying mess of memes, internet hall of fame pictures and trolling. So when students in Stanford’s computer science program realised that emailing one address would contact EVERY student, well, you bet it got real fun real fast.
This happened recently when 40,000 students at NYU realised they could exploit an old ListManager program and email all 40,000 students at NYU. Stanford’s mistake was arguably even easier access: ANYONE can email ANYTHING to EVERY computer science Stanford student at this email address: students@cs.stanford.edu.
So some spambot found out about that address and bombarded student email accounts with your typical spam. Russian girls looking for love, Nigerian princes shilling their Viagra pills, etc. But then enterprising Stanford kids probably realised the email address the spammers were targeting to contact everyone and decided to join in on the fun.
The best reply might have been from “6oea1li6z8+xxr52tcw9@guerrillamail.com”. The person suggested a fix for everyone to follow:
“Ok, so ignoring the other methods that don’t work I’m going to tell you how to actually do it.
Go to the Stanford Zimbra Mail Listserv admin page (http://bit.ly/4kzYKr) and select “unsubscribe from a list”. Type in student@cs.stanford.eduand enjoy the rest of your evening!
The bit.ly link actually redirected to meatspin. God, the faces of innocent computer science students must have been glorious. See more of the fiasco here. [BuzzFeed]