We have contacted our customer regarding your "beoutdoors.com" spam complaint. Below is their explanation describing the situation. Between Friday evening May 5, 2000 and Monday morning, May 8, 2000 there was unauthorized use of beOutdoors assets and its Internet access that resulted in the sending of unsolicited commercial email to an unknown number of email addresses. This was done without any authorization or knowledge of any company manager. Specifically sometime Friday evening May 5 one of our young technical employees (now ex-employee) and a friend of his entered the beOutdoors facility (without authorization) and set up an email program on an internal server to send our cash sweepstakes announcement to email addresses contained on a CD the employees friend had acquired. We are unable to determine the number of emails sent or to whom they were sent since three of our internal servers crashed as a result of the individuals unauthorized use. Based upon complaints we do know that many individuals received several copies of the email. Due to the crash of our internal servers it has taken us a little over a week to become fully operational again and complete our investigation to determine if there was criminal intent. After a discussion with the District Attorney�s office and the individuals who perpetrated the email disaster it appears that there was no criminal intent just misguided, unauthorized actions by two very immature individuals. The employee was terminated but not prosecuted. We want to apologize to Exodus and any others that may have been impacted in anyway by the unauthorized actions of a now former employee. --- -- Eric Uratchko Policy Enforcement Specialist Exodus Communications, Inc. 1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 7700 -- Kathleen Policy Enforcement Manager Exodus Communications, Inc. 1-888-2EXODUS, Ext. 3984
