E-mail bomb
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Internet usage, an e-mail bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of e-mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server. Mailbombing is the act of sending an e-mail bomb, a term shared with the act of sending actual exploding devices (see mailbomb). Mailbombing is sometimes accomplished by giving the victim's email address to multiple spammers.
In the Russian internet community, there is another sense for mailbomb. There, mailbomb is a form of denial of service attack against a computer system (mail server). After most of the servers began checking mail with anti-virus software, the trojan viruses tried to send themselves compressed into archives, such as ZIP or RAR or 7-Zip. Then mailservers began to unpack archives and check their contents too. That gave black hats the idea to make a huge text file, containing, for example, only the letter z repeated millions of times. Such a file compresses into a relatively small archive, but being unpacked by early versions of mail servers might waste the free space on its disks and cause denial of service. Also known as a Zip bomb.
There are two ways of email bombing-- mass mailing and list linking.
Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same email ID. These types of mail bombers are simple to design; but due to their extreme simplicity, they can be easily filtered by spam filters.
List linking on the other hand, consists of signing a particular email id up to several subscriptions. This type of bombing is effective as the person has to unsubscribe from all the services manually. In order to prevent this type of bombing, most services send a confirmation email to your inbox when you register for the subscription on that particular website.
