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

Re:DoS!=DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt. I suppose you never looked at \\, or in boot.ini to find out what Windows NT actually does to address multiple disks. The usage of drive letters is an old standard that they've kept alive, it's not necessary, you can mount another drive in the file tree for the main drive. NT is based loosely on VMS, remember, which was Unix's number one competitor, and used many of the same conventions. DOS also is not an OS, it's nothing but a CLI for the BIOS.

Pull your head out.

Re:DoS!=DOS

[srvivn21]

While the parent that you responded to is a bit rude, he is (at least partly) correct. I have a Win2K Pro setup at home with two 4.2 GB drives. One of them is mounted as my C: and P: drives (the partition holding the P: drive is my page file), and the other is mounted as a directory under "Program Files" called "Games". It has no drive letter.

I don't know if this was possible in NT, but here is an article on how it's done in 2000 or XP.

Re:DoS!=DOS

[Archfeld]

Why can I only define 26 drives then total, local + fiber attached SAN disks in a Hitachi frame in Win2K AS or even Data Center. Your article only shows how to CHANGE the drive letter not how to have a drive WITHOUT a needed letter, What I need is unix like /dev/dsk/yada yada...
Exchange storage groups can only be a certain size for managability reasons, my monster server, 8 way cluster servers with 8gb of memory can handle oodles off sg's but each one is a drive and I am limited to 26 in any environment.
Thanks for the link though.