Email Bombing and Spamming, and ways to protect yourself

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Email bombing is a form of internet abuse in which massive volumes of identical emails are sent to a specific email address to touch on the operating organisation of a computer. When the mailbox gets flooded with countless unwanted emails, its capacity gets exhausted, leading to an disability to receive farther emails. This may be done to prevent the victim from receiving or noticing some other important bulletin in their mail. A sluggish system or inability to transport or receive emails can be indications of getting e-mail bombed. This happens because the system is already pre-occupied with processing endless emails.

Email Bombing and Spamming

There are three methods of email bombing: Mass mailing, List linking and ZIP bombing. Mass mailing involves sending several duplicate emails to the aforementioned address but can be hands detected by spam filters. The 2nd, List linking, involves subscribing the target e-mail address to dissimilar email list subscriptions. The user would e'er receive spam mail service from all these subscriptions and will have to manually unsubscribe from each list separately. Electronic mail bombing done using ZIP archived attachments containing millions and billions of characters is known as Aught bombing. Mail servers checking the mail with anti-virus software would require a greater amount of processing power, perhaps resulting in Denial of Service.

While you cannot eliminate the chances of being email bombed, in that location are some preventive & protective measures you lot can take to reduce their effect. Here are some of them:

one] Apply anti-virus software and firewall – Y'all can reduce the chances of existence attacked, by using anti-virus and putting upward a firewall configured to restrict traffic.

Utilise e-mail filter applications– Email filters are packages that are used to manage unsolicited emails by filtering emails according to the source accost. Some of the email filters that are commonly used for Mac OS are:

SpamSweep
Spamfence
POPFile
Personal AntiSpam X5

Filter packet tools for Windows include:

Email Chomper
Spam Buster
Cactus Spam Filter
SpamKiller

2] Utilise Proxy Servers– Information technology is hard to spam and filter each and every email bomb coming from different IP addresses. Such a situation could be mitigated with the help of proxy servers. A proxy server is a computer to which all other computers in a particular network are continued. The proxy server has sure rules for filtering the messages it receives requesting for information and resources of the computers connected to it. This helps in filtering malicious requests and messages from suspicious IP addresses before they are sent to the clients of the proxy server.

3] Using Elementary Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)- Deprival of Service attacks can also be solved using SMTP which is a method of authenticating the commutation of messages across Cyberspace protocols. The clients admission their mailbox using Post Office Protocol (POP) or the Net Message Admission Protocol (IMAP). Through SMTP, the Mail Submission Agent then transfers a postal service or information to the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). On connecting to the SMTP, the MTA analyses the mail exchange record and IP address of the sender and reject the message if they are found suspicious. Security mechanisms such every bit hallmark and negotiation are candy during the commutation of data.

Information technology is of import that you lot identify the source of the email bombs and in one case you have identified information technology, you lot demand to configure your router or firewall and prevent incoming packets from that address.

Read next: Benefits of Masking Electronic mail Address.

Karan Khanna is a passionate Windows user who loves troubleshooting Windows xi/ten problems in specific and writing about Microsoft technologies in general.