Need information about mail bomb.

[Elkanah]

hi,

I want to know what do you mean by the term called mail bomb in the internet world.... Is it hazardous to our system ?
Anybody having knowlegde about the same..... please provide your ideas.....

thnx

[Jackson2]

E-mail Bomb - 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 where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack.

Methods of email bombing -
There are two methods of perpetrating an e-mail bomb

1. mass mailing
2. list linking

Mass mailing

Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same email address. These types of mail bombs are simple to design but their extreme simplicity means they can be easily detected by spam filters.
Email-bombing using mass mailing is also commonly performed as a DDoS attack by employing the use of "zombie" botnets; hierarchical networks of computers compromised by malware and under the attacker's control.
Similar to their use in spamming, the attacker instructs the botnet to send out millions or even billions of e-mails, but unlike normal botnet spamming, the e-mails are all addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood.
This form of email bombing is similar in purpose to other DDoS flooding attacks.
As the targets are frequently the dedicated hosts handling website and e-mail accounts of a business, this type of attack can be just as devastating to both services of the host.

This type of attack is more difficult to defend against than a simple mass-mailing bomb because of the multiple source addresses and the possibility of each zombie computer sending a different message or employing stealth techniques to defeat spam filters.

List linking

List linking means signing a particular email address up to several email list subscriptions. The victim then has to unsubscribe from these unwanted services manually. In order to prevent this type of bombing, most email subscription services send a confirmation email to a person's inbox when that email is used to register for a subscription.

[Techno01]

Zip bombing -

A ZIP bomb is a variant of mail-bombing. After most commercial mail servers began checking mail with anti-virus software and filtering certain malicious file types, trojan horse viruses tried to send themselves compressed into archives, such as ZIP, RAR or 7-Zip. Mail server software was then configured to unpack archives and check their contents as well. That gave black hats the idea to compose a "bomb" consisting of an enormous text file, containing, for example, only the letter z repeated millions of times. Such a file compresses into a relatively small archive, but its unpacking (especially by early versions of mail servers) would use a high amount of processing power, RAM and swap space, which could result in denial of service. Modern mail server computers usually have sufficient intelligence to recognize such attacks as well as sufficient processing power and memory space to process malicious attachments without interruption of service, though some are still susceptible to this technique if the ZIP bomb is mass-mailed.

[Trio]

Defintion - A mail bomb is the sending of a massive amount of e-mail to a specific person or system. A huge amount of mail may simply fill up the recipient's disk space on the server or, in some cases, may be too much for a server to handle and may cause the server to stop functioning. In the past, mail bombs have been used to "punish" Internet users who have been egregious violators of netiquette (for example, people using e-mail for undesired advertising, or spam).

Mail bombs not only inconvenience the intended target but they are also likely to inconvenience everybody using the server. Senders of mail bombs should be wary of exposing themselves to reciprocal mail bombs or to legal actions.

[deveritt]

Text bombing is also one of these forms.
Text bombing is the spam-sending of repetitive or identical text messages to a target individual's mobile phone many times via SMS.
Text bombing is carried out either for the perpetrator's own enjoyment or the disruption of the target's genuine text messaging use by flooding their inbox. Bombings can be a carried out by one person or a group of people where all members of the group text bomb one single target.
The advantage of a group bombing, aside from the increased amount of messages or the spread of messaging costs, is that the victim has no single person to retaliate against.

For budgetary reasons, text bombers prefer to use a tariff that includes unlimited text messages, so that their victim receives as many messages as possible for maximum disruption, with minimum cost to the participants.