paper D.o.S? (Was RE: RIAA Non-Compliant Copyright Infringement Complaints)

[Graham Toal <gtoal () UTPA EDU>]

> > > That bogus one also specified port 942748.  Needless to say, we 
> > > ignored that one.  :)
> >
> > We got just one of those (with a very high illegal port 
> number) as well.
>
>
> We got one of those recently too.

I haven't seen one of these myself, but I wonder...

... could it be that some hacker has come up with some sort
of letter generator which prints fake DMCA takedown notices?

Maybe they're currently tweaking the parameters and only
sending out a few of these at a time, but with the intention
of once they look convincingly realistic, they'll unlease a
flood of them?

The consequence of this would be a significantly increased
workload for whoever handles your DMCA notices, because you
would need to check back every notice with its issuer to
confirm that it was genuine - and with enough extra work like
this, your DMCA handling operation could get permanently backlogged.

It's a plausibility.  It's been seen before that as few as
1 or 2 FOIA requests per day can bring an institution to its
knees, by having all the top brass and legal folks running
around in panic mode; I can easily see a similar problem handling
DMCA notices.

Be nice to compare a scan of one of these 'funny' requests against
a known legit one.  Also I wonder if you've kept the envelopes?
If they are spoofs, I'd bet they'd have local postmarks...


Graham