DOS Attack Via US Postal Service

Phronesis writes "Bruce Schneier reports in Crypto-Gram about the slashdot-inspired Post-office DOS attack on SPAM-king Alan Ralsky. More interesting, Schneier writes, is a recent paper on Defending against an internet-based attack on the physical world, which generalizes this attack and discusses how it could be automated and how one might defend against it (you can't stop it, but you could make it harder to effect). From the abstract of the article: 'The attack is, to some degree, a consequence of the availability of private information on the Web, and the increase in the amount of personal information that users must reveal to obtain Web services.'"

Comments

More info at newscientist

[pjgeer]

It's like an executive summary of all the above links.

How about a digital pager DDOS attack?

[philipsblows]

Take:

• One phone number (the victim)
• One war dialer
• Many, many pager numbers

Empirically, 1000 pagers (at 3-4 dial sequences per minute) equals about 4 days of constant calls to the vicitim's phone. How I know this is another discussion...

Of course, this was more effective when digital pagers were much, much more popular. Today, it probably wouldn't go over as well, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, it worked flawlessly. Essentially, it was distributed crank calling before the "DDOS" term was coined.

The most interesting part was that the pager companies explicitly refused to do anything about it. No tracing of calls, no attempts to halt sequential dialing, etc. Not their problem.

From The Spamhaus Project

[djaxl]

Alan Ralsky aliases and addresses.

Seems like his "real" address is:
Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield,
MI 48322
Telephone: 248-926-0688
Current email address: amr777@comcast.net