Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: mail storm
From: Albert-Lunde () nwu edu (Albert Lunde)
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 22:55:38 -0500
Imagine a hacker really doesn't like someone, and is willing to do something disruptive to a lot of other people to spite that one person. Or imagine that they just want to do something very disruptive. Imagine the hacker picks 2n mailing lists, subscribing the i'th to the
I've seen this played out on a smaller scale on several lists, when a bogus auto-reply program, or an exceptionally dumb person, replied to the list to every message, including a copy of the previous message in each reply. This resulted in an exponential growth, though perhaps at a slower rate than the scheme you outline. It did put the list in question out of production for up to several days, till a list admin had time to notice and fix it. In practice, there did seem in every case to be some (annoyingly large) maximum volume/per hour beyond which the lists would not run, so exponential growth only went till saturation was reached. But I suppose the combination of several out-of-control lists could bombard one mailbox much faster. I don't think it is more dangerous than an assortment of other denial of service attacks, but this doesn't mean we are "safe".
Current thread:
- Re: IRIX 5.3 chost Grant Kaufmann (Aug 07)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: IRIX 5.3 chost Bill Nickless (Aug 11)
- Re: IRIX 5.3 chost Grant Kaufmann (Aug 12)
- Re: IRIX 5.3 chost Vern Hart (Aug 12)
- Re: IRIX 5.3 chost Mike Kienenberger (Aug 12)
- mail storm Dan Stromberg (Aug 12)
- Re: mail storm Dan Stromberg (Aug 12)
- Re: mail storm Arik Baratz (Aug 13)
- Re: mail storm Albert Lunde (Aug 12)
- Re: mail storm Igor Chudov @ home (Aug 12)
- Vulnrability in all known Linux distributions bloodmask (Aug 12)
- Re: Vulnrability in all known Linux distributions Steve Czetty (Aug 13)
- Re: Vulnrability in all known Linux distributions Alan Brown (Aug 13)
- Re: Vulnrability in all known Linux distributions Elliot Lee (Aug 13)
- Re: Vulnrability in all known Linux distributions Alan Cox (Aug 14)
- mount/umount realpath() buffer overflow David J. Meltzer (Aug 13)
- Possible bufferoverflow condition in lpr, xterm and xload bloodmask (Aug 12)
- Re: Possible bufferoverflow condition in lpr, xterm and xload Digital Dreamer (Aug 12)
- Re: Possible bufferoverflow condition in lpr, xterm and xload Casper Dik (Aug 13)