University students in London have e-mail hacked which results in tons of spam asking them to sign up for porn websites or the Sarah Palin Channel. Not sure how they were able to tell them apart.

"Stop touching yourself, this is not a porn channel!"

Courtesy of the Independent:  

University College London’s (UCL) email database suffered a meltdown last night after a spam email was sent to every student – all 26,000 of them – opening up a black hole of an email thread with as many as 3,000 replies. 

The first message purported to be from the generic email thread of UCL Provost Michael Arthur at 10.47pm last night, simply – and cryptically – reading just “bello”. It is thought it was hacked or at least spoofed. 

With the internal email address of ‘all-students@ucl.ac.uk’ now visible to all, a mass email thread from irritated students commenced and, as you can expect, also had jokers taking full advantage of the security breach. 

In emails shown to the Independent, some recipients began cordially replying “bello” to the initial message, before one understandably exclaimed: “STOP SPAMMING PEOPLE!!!!!!!”. 

Desperate pleads for people to stop hitting ‘reply all’ were left unanswered, as the countless emails kept bouncing into people’s inboxes before the obligatory attempts at humour began. 

“Bello, is it me you’re looking for” was a call ricocheting in the bottomless pit of emails that included sign-ups to YouPorn, the One Direction mailing list, Ukip and the Sarah Palin Channel.

After that #BelloGate started trending on Twitter and when the university students woke up the next morning some of them had as many as 3,000 e-mails to sort through.

I am not sure who thought to include the Sarah Palin Channel in with signups for porn websites, but clearly it was a stroke of genius.

I just feel bad for the poor schlub who paid his $9.95, got out his hand lotion dispenser and Kleenex, and then was confronted with this face.

Seriously, that could put you off masturbation for life!