Researchers discover new distributed denial of post office box attack:

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Researchers discover new distributed denial of post office box attack: In a
paper called "Defending Against an Internet-based Attack on the Physical
World, <http://www.avirubin.com/scripted.attacks.pdf> " researchers at Johns
Hopkins University and AT&T Labs describe an Internet attack in which a
victim is automatically subscribed to hundreds of thousands of catalogue
request forms that are available online. "What's interesting about this
attack is that it exploits the boundary between cyberspace and the real
world," Bruce Schneier notes in this week's issue of Crypto-gram
<http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0304.html> . "The reason spamming
normally doesn't work with physical mail is that sending a piece of mail
costs money, and it's just too expensive to bury someone's house in mail.
Subscribing someone to magazines and signing them up for embarrassing
catalogs is an old trick, but it has limitations because it's physically
difficult to do it on a large scale. But this attack exploits the automation
properties of the Internet, the Web availability of catalog request forms,
and the paper world of the Post Office and catalog mailings. All the pieces
are required for the attack to work. And there's no easy defense. Companies
want to make it easy for someone to request a catalog. If the attacker used
an anonymous connection to launch his attack -- one of the zillions of open
wireless networks would be a good choice -- I don't see how he would ever
get caught. Even worse, it could take years for the victim to get his name
off all of the mailing lists -- if he ever could."

http://www.avirubin.com/scripted.attacks.pdf

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