Severe spam brings the house down - News - Security

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Severe spam brings the house down

By Mark Street, IT Week
January 22, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/soa/Severe-spam-brings-the-house-down/0,130061744,120150525,00.htm

Calls for a total ban on spam were renewed last week after two million unsolicited emails brought down mail servers belonging to business Internet service provider, (ISP) Pipex, and left hundreds of thousands of customers without email capability for days.

"This kind of attack is all the more reason for Europe to adopt a code banning the sending of unsolicited emails, unless consumers choose to opt in," said Joe McNamee, spokesman for the European ISP Association. While McNamee's comments echo those of EU information society commissioner, Erkki Liikanen, there are also concerns that such a law would hamper some e-commerce plans, such as those that depend on sending details of offers to consumers' mobile phones.

Some users of the Pipex dial-up service were unable to receive email for five days after the company's servers were clogged up by more than two million unsolicited commercial messages from Canada. The problem was so severe that the disruption to services lasted until last Wednesday evening.

"Although most of the spam mails were deleted, the quantity of genuine mail stored was so great that the system, which serves about one million users, continued to pass mail, only slowly," said Richard Woods, a spokesman for Pipex's parent company, UUNet. "Engineers worked continuously on all mail servers throughout Thursday, Friday and the weekend [11 to 15 January]. We are working to ensure that no mail on our system has been lost."

In a statement UUNet said that it was pursuing the Canadian company responsible for broadcasting the unsolicited messages. "Action will also be taken as part of the continuing upgrading of the service to continue to take every reasonable precaution against unsolicited commercial email in the future," said Woods.

The European ISP Association said that this was not the first time that ISP servers had been brought down by spam attacks. "The problem is that ISP's filtering systems cannot be too strict, as this could prevent legitimate mail from getting through," said the association's McNamee.

Some companies have successfully used laws covering trespass, illegal access and unauthorised use of equipment to bring about prosecutions against senders of unsolicited email.