|
What to Expect of 'Spamalot'? A Lot of Spam
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER
Published: March 12, 2005
 pamalot"
fans who signed up for a newsletter on the Broadway musical's official
Web site may end up getting, well, spammed a lot. "Movin' Out" devotees
may have the same problem. A security glitch - now fixed - exposed the
names and postal and e-mail addresses of more than 31,000 people to
savvy computer users.
Up
until Thursday evening, when a reporter from The New York Times pointed
out the problem to the Web sites' developer, visiting a specific
address on the shows' sites produced a long page with mailing-list
data. The security hole was not obvious to casual Web surfers because
the address was buried in the site's code. But it could have been
discovered by someone deliberately seeking the list data, or by a kind
of program used by spammers to scour the Web for new e-mail addresses
to bombard. Both montypythonsspamalot.com, where 19,000 people had signed up for a newsletter, and movinoutonbroadway.com, where 14,000 had, were built by Mark Stevenson, a designer in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. Mr.
Stevenson said he had hired a programmer, whom he would not identify,
to add the list sign-up function to the sites. He said that the amount
of resources put into security on the sites had seemed adequate, but
"in retrospect, this was not enough, and we need to do more." He said
that a message would be sent to the list with a warning about
fraudulent e-mail messages. Mark Wilkie, a software engineer
who maintains Web sites for Gawker Media, said the ability to view the
data must have been built into the sign-up software, but it was not
clear why someone would do this. "Security-wise, it's a horrible thing
to do," he said. Aaron Meier, a spokesman for Monty Python's "Spamalot," said yesterday that the show would have no comment. When
told by e-mail message about the breach, several people who had signed
up for the "Spamalot" list said they were unsurprised, given the state
of Internet security and the aggressiveness of spammers. Several noted
that there was something appropriately Pythonesque about the incident.
After all, Internet historians say that the use of the word spam to
refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python
sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group
of Vikings chanting the word over and over. The sketch and its song
about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical. "Are
you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" joked one list subscriber,
Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."
|
