[47096] in Cypherpunks
Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb from luzskru@cpcnet.com
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bryce)
Fri Jan 12 19:28:24 1996
To: abostick@netcom.com, cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: bryce@colorado.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 12 Jan 1996 14:32:59 MST."
<v02120d00ad1c6796463d@[199.0.65.105]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 17:17:09 -0700
From: Bryce <wilcoxb@nagina.cs.colorado.edu>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
An entity calling itself ABostick allegedly wrote:
>
> 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.
<snip>
> Cypherpunks: is there any way to respond to, or prevent, this sort of
> attack short of actually shutting down the remailer?
>
> What comes to my mind is the remailer operator grepping for a character
> string of ASCII-armored cyphertext from the known attack message and
> throwing messages containing it into the bit-bucket. It is highly
> unlikely that this would appear in any message except the attack
> message. The problem with this is that it works only for a known attack
> message -- it can shut down an ongoing attack, but it can't prevent new
> ones.
You could have remailers clamp down on multiple copies of the
same message, but that is easily countered by convincing the
UseNet stupes to insert their e-mail address or something.
In general there is no way to prevent this kind of mail-bombing
without compromising anonymity.
By the way Alan--your message failed PGP verification.
I received it by way of Bob Hettinga's "e$pam" list. While
Hettinga gets double-plus good points for content, his
technical performance as a list operator is lacking.
Which is to say: the message might have gotten munged by the
"e$pam" list processor.
Regards,
Bryce
PGP sig follows
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.2
Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01
iQCVAwUBMPb5w/WZSllhfG25AQGtPwQAgoxim084bbBkXIQyhePSY63HttrqFZg9
JGJjbKBMc6fHgI+gylEEAhl75wVUgq5jKPJcHVfY23XVS4wfPRu+CIx8uHhVm9xB
limA3BUscRutWsSXXe+tkKtyA97xUjpAMHpaE729pGeRForHEdpkRFb5jC3DjofX
lNpRuRQ9+VE=
=CyXg
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
