From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 96 21:01:40 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb
Message-ID: <v02120d04ad1ce99ff703@[199.0.65.105]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jammin' on the mailbomb trick...

Looks like it's a variant of another scheme used elsewhere, viz,


--- begin forwarded text

To: rah@shipwright.com (Robert A. Hettinga)
From: oldbear@arctos.com (The Old Bear)
Subject: Re: Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 23:10:43 EDT

rah@shipwright.com (Robert A. Hettinga) writes:

>From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert A. Hettinga)
>Newsgroups: tiac
>Subject: Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb
>Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 14:34:18 -0500
>Organization: e$

>| Somebody, too clever for their own good by half, has come up with a
>| novel way of using Usenet and anonymous remailers to perpetrate
>| mailbombs.  The M.O. is to post a message to the naked-lady newsgroups
>| saying "get pics in your mailbox! send this message to this address!),
>| giving the email address of a cypherpunk-style anonymous remailer and
>| including a pgp-encrypted message block.


A variation on the mailbomb from dispersed unwitting sites, except involving
the telephone network, was discussed on alt.dcom.telecom some time back.

Maybe you call this a phone bomb.

As you know, pager companies get blocks of numbers within a local
exchange for their operations.  So, for example, 635-3000 to 635-3999 may
represent a thousand radio pager customers of a particular paging
company.

Wanting to harrass an estranged spouse, some nefarious character
programmed a dialler deamon to sequentially call each of the numbers in
a pager block and leave a messsage to return call to the spouse's phone
number.  Naturally, caller id did no good to track or ignore the
unwanted calls to the spouse at all hours from pager subscribers who
were receiving messages on their alpha-numberic pagers to call the
spouse's number.  'Wrong number' calls were coming in to the spouse from
all over at all times.  Moreover, it is virtually impossible for a pager
company to track a single number which calls each of its lines only once.

Definitely not a nice thing.
--- end forwarded text


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/