E-mail bomb

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Internet usage, an e-mail bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of e-mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server. Mailbombing is the act of sending an e-mail bomb, a term shared with the act of sending actual exploding devices (see mailbomb). Mailbombing is sometimes accomplished by giving the victim's email address to multiple spammers.

In the Russian Internet area, there is one more sense for mailbomb. There, mailbomb is a form of denial of service attack against a computer system (mail server). After the most of servers began checking the trespassing mail with anti-virus software, the trojan viruses tried to send themselves compressed into archive, such as ZIP or RAR or 7-Zip. Then mailservers began to unpack archives and check their contents too. That gave black hats the idea to make a huge text file, containing, for example, only the letter 'Z' repeated millions of times. Such a file compresses in relatively small archive, but being unpacked by early versions of mail servers might waste the free space on its disks and cause denial of service. Also known as, "Zip Bombs."