Email Bombs

It is one thing to send one or two messages to government policymakers, even on a daily basis. But it is quite another to bombard them with thousands of messages at once, distributed with the aid of automated tools. The effect can be to completely jam a recipient’s incoming email box, making it impossible for legitimate email to get through. Thus, an email bomb is also a form of virtual blockade. Although email bombs are often used as a means of revenge or harassment, they have also been used to protest government policies.

In what some U.S. intelligence authorities characterized as the first known attack by terrorists against a country’s computer systems, ethnic Tamil guerrillas were said to have swamped Sri Lankan embassies with thousands of electronic mail messages. The messages read “We are the Internet Black Tigers and we’re doing this to disrupt your communications.” An offshoot of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which had been fighting for an independent homeland for minority Tamils, was credited with the 1998 incident.

The email bombing consisted of about 800 emails a day for about two weeks. William Church, editor for the Centre for Infrastructural Warfare Studies (CIWARS), observed that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil are desperate for publicity and they got exactly what they wanted considering the routinely deadly attacks committed by the Tigers, if this type of activity distracts them from bombing and killing then CIWARS would like to encourage them, in the name of peace, to do more of this type of “terrorist” activity.

The attack, however, was said to have had the desired effect of generating fear in the embassies.

During the Kosovo conflict, protestors on both sides email bombed government sites. According to PA News, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the NATO server had been saturated at the end of March by one individual who was sending 2,000 messages a day.Fox News reported that when California resident Richard Clark heard of attacks against NATO’s web site by Belgrade hackers, he retaliated by sending an email bomb to the Yugoslav government’s site. Clark said that a few days and 500,000 emails into the siege, the site went down. He did not claim full responsibility but said he “played a part.” That part did not go unrecognized. His Internet service provider, Pacific Bell, cut off his service, saying his actions violated their spamming policy.

An email bombing was conducted against the San Francisco–based Internet service provider Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in 1997 for hosting the web pages of the Euskal Herria Journal, a controversial publication edited by a New York group supporting independence of the mountainous Basque provinces of northern Spain and southwestern France. Protestors claimed IGC “supports terrorism” because a section on the web pages contained materials on the terrorist group Fatherland and Liberty, or ETA, which was responsible for killing over 800 people during its nearly 30-year struggle for an independent Basque state. The attack against IGC began after members of the ETA assassinated a popular town councilor in northern Spain.

Conclusively; the protestors’ objective was censorship. They wanted the site pulled. To get their way, they bombarded IGC with thousands of bogus messages routed through hundreds of different mail relays. As a result, mail was tied up and undeliverable to IGC’s email users, and support lines were tied up with people who couldn’t get their mail. The attackers also spammed IGC staff and member accounts, clogged their web page with bogus credit card orders, and threatened to employ the same tactics against organizations using IGC services. The only way IGC could stop the attack was by blocking access from all of the relay servers

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686