Were I you, I would forward such a threat to some appropriate authorities. Geoff White writes:
On Tue, 13 May 1997, David Stoddard wrote:
In the war against spam, its getting harder to figure out who the good guys are. Last weekend, we had an incident where a server called pure.fiber.net was relaying thousands of spam messages off one of our mail servers. While we have filters in place to block the obvious spammers (cyberpromo and others), we don't learn about new ones until they cross the line (or we get them from Paul's site at http://www.vix.com/spam -- thanks Paul!).
<snip>
Indeed things are getting strange, look at this letter I got in my mailbox this morning...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From www@www-01.io.com Wed May 14 00:27:05 1997 Received: from www-01.io.com (www-01.io.com [199.170.88.39]) by precipice.v-site.net (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id AAA23538 for <geoffw@v-site.net>; Wed, 14 May 1997 00:26:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from www@localhost) by www-01.io.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id CAA30444; Wed, 14 May 1997 02:19:46 -0500 Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 02:19:46 -0500 Message-Id: <199705140719.CAA30444@www-01.io.com> From: The Dawn Patrol <hipcrime@post1.com> To: geoffw@v-site.net Reply-To: hipcrime@post1.com Errors-To: hipcrime@post1.com Sender: hipcrime@post1.com Subject: Your liability X-Mail-Gateway: Doug's WWW Mail Gateway 2.1.1 X-Real-Host-From: sol.infonex.com Status: RO X-Status:
Geoff White,
We have watched with some amusement the antics of your friend Robert, but we can long longer sit back passively and just watch as he continues to cause others harm and grief.
In addition to his many other transgressions, he is now threatening people with hack attacks on their systems and with physical harm. This, and all of his many other crimes must end immediately.
We are in now in the process of insuring that Robert's web presence will be revoked in all of the places he has infected with it. For the moment, we have decided to allow him to keep his E-mail accounts but we will quickly arrange for those also to be revoked if he insists on continuing to cause harm and annoyance to others on the net.
More importantly however, we will henceforth be holding you and your v-site.net site responsible for and further crimes that he commits online against the people he thinks are his enemies. If there are any security-related incidents at any of the sites run by any of these people, we will find out about it, and you will then be forced to deal with similar unfortunate events at your own site. If necessary, we will also and likewise respond to any hacking activities by Robert with additional measures against vcinternet.
We are certain that you have a significant investment in hardware and software at your site that you would not like to have placed in jeopardy, so it is in your interest now to contact your friend Robert and have him cease his threats and attacks on people on the Internet. We suggest that you use all means of persuasion at your disposal to do this, and that you do it immediately. No further warnings will be sent to you regarding this matter.
The Dawn Patrol
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now Robert did have a Web account here months ago, he was canned for misusing my sendmail daemon with his fameous Java applet that let's you spam the net by surfing for <mailto> tags. He is long gone but now I have to deal with clueless vigilanties who are threatening to hack my systems because of someone long gone, hey is this the french revolution or what?
In any event if it get to this I will toast anybody who trys to f*ck with my systems.
geoffw