To accomplish the sporgery attack, the spammers used several methods to acquire Internet access. Open NNTP servers were used when available, to such an extent that a great many had to be closed by their owners. When open NNTP servers eventually became scarce, open proxies were used. These proxies allowed Scientology partisans to use someone else's computer hardware to sporge. Because default security policies in many proxy server products at the time (late 1990s) were lax, many such proxies were available for abuse. Since that time, open proxies have become the most popular resource for other spammers to abuse, eclipsing open relays and other insecure hosts.