Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
paper D.o.S? (Was RE: RIAA Non-Compliant Copyright Infringement Complaints)
From: Graham Toal <gtoal () UTPA EDU>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 13:12:37 -0500
That bogus one also specified port 942748. Needless to say, we ignored that one. :)We got just one of those (with a very high illegal portnumber) as well. We got one of those recently too.
I haven't seen one of these myself, but I wonder... ... could it be that some hacker has come up with some sort of letter generator which prints fake DMCA takedown notices? Maybe they're currently tweaking the parameters and only sending out a few of these at a time, but with the intention of once they look convincingly realistic, they'll unlease a flood of them? The consequence of this would be a significantly increased workload for whoever handles your DMCA notices, because you would need to check back every notice with its issuer to confirm that it was genuine - and with enough extra work like this, your DMCA handling operation could get permanently backlogged. It's a plausibility. It's been seen before that as few as 1 or 2 FOIA requests per day can bring an institution to its knees, by having all the top brass and legal folks running around in panic mode; I can easily see a similar problem handling DMCA notices. Be nice to compare a scan of one of these 'funny' requests against a known legit one. Also I wonder if you've kept the envelopes? If they are spoofs, I'd bet they'd have local postmarks... Graham
Current thread:
- paper D.o.S? (Was RE: RIAA Non-Compliant Copyright Infringement Complaints) Graham Toal (Oct 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: paper D.o.S? (Was RE: RIAA Non-Compliant Copyright Infringement Complaints) Julian Y. Koh (Oct 05)