- Jul 27, 2015
- 5,458
The article is a long read but very interesting as it's another way of attacks.
Qoute : " As a reporter who has covered technology for more than two decades, I am familiar with the usual forms of internet harassment—gangs that bring down a website, haters who post your home address online, troll armies that hurl insults on a social network. But I’d never encountered this type of email onslaught before. I wasn’t sure what to do. “Hey Twitter—any advice on what to do when somebody malevolent signs you up for a thousand email subscriptions, making your email unusable?” I tweeted.
At first it seemed like a funny prank, like ordering pizza delivered to an ex-boyfriend’s house. “TBH [to be honest] it’s kind of a clever attack,” I tweeted again.
But as the emails continued to roll in, my sense of humor faded. By noon, the entire email system at our employer, ProPublica, was overwhelmed. Most of my colleagues could not send or receive messages because of the backlog of emails to me, Jeff, and Lauren that were clogging the spam filters.
The tech team advised that it would likely have to block all incoming emails to our inboxes—bouncing them back to senders—to save the rest of the organization. A few hours later, when ProPublica pulled the plug on our email accounts, I realized that what our attackers did was no joking matter; they had cut off our most important avenue of communication with the world. “Preparing to say goodbye forever to my inbox,” I tweeted. “It does seem like killing a reporter’s email account is the definition of a chilling effect, no?” "
Quote : " Our system was designed to fight the last war—to defend against a traditional spam attack, in which an identical email is sent to multiple recipients. Its design didn’t take into account the inverse strategy adopted by our harassers: thousands of unique emails sent to the same recipient. When our systems were overwhelmed, we didn’t have the advantage of a major internet provider with massive capacity in its spam filter.
Life without our work email accounts was a little strange. ProPublica gave us temporary accounts with different user names, but since no one knew these new email addresses and we were afraid to publicize them, our inboxes were eerily silent. "
www.propublica.org
Qoute : " As a reporter who has covered technology for more than two decades, I am familiar with the usual forms of internet harassment—gangs that bring down a website, haters who post your home address online, troll armies that hurl insults on a social network. But I’d never encountered this type of email onslaught before. I wasn’t sure what to do. “Hey Twitter—any advice on what to do when somebody malevolent signs you up for a thousand email subscriptions, making your email unusable?” I tweeted.
At first it seemed like a funny prank, like ordering pizza delivered to an ex-boyfriend’s house. “TBH [to be honest] it’s kind of a clever attack,” I tweeted again.
But as the emails continued to roll in, my sense of humor faded. By noon, the entire email system at our employer, ProPublica, was overwhelmed. Most of my colleagues could not send or receive messages because of the backlog of emails to me, Jeff, and Lauren that were clogging the spam filters.
The tech team advised that it would likely have to block all incoming emails to our inboxes—bouncing them back to senders—to save the rest of the organization. A few hours later, when ProPublica pulled the plug on our email accounts, I realized that what our attackers did was no joking matter; they had cut off our most important avenue of communication with the world. “Preparing to say goodbye forever to my inbox,” I tweeted. “It does seem like killing a reporter’s email account is the definition of a chilling effect, no?” "
Quote : " Our system was designed to fight the last war—to defend against a traditional spam attack, in which an identical email is sent to multiple recipients. Its design didn’t take into account the inverse strategy adopted by our harassers: thousands of unique emails sent to the same recipient. When our systems were overwhelmed, we didn’t have the advantage of a major internet provider with massive capacity in its spam filter.
Life without our work email accounts was a little strange. ProPublica gave us temporary accounts with different user names, but since no one knew these new email addresses and we were afraid to publicize them, our inboxes were eerily silent. "
Cheap Tricks: The Low Cost of Internet Harassment
How haters attacked three ProPublica reporters with email bombs and Twitter bots and covered their tracks.
www.propublica.org
