DOS Attack Via US Postal Service

Phronesis writes "Bruce Schneier reports in Crypto-Gram about the slashdot-inspired Post-office DOS attack on SPAM-king Alan Ralsky. More interesting, Schneier writes, is a recent paper on Defending against an internet-based attack on the physical world, which generalizes this attack and discusses how it could be automated and how one might defend against it (you can't stop it, but you could make it harder to effect). From the abstract of the article: 'The attack is, to some degree, a consequence of the availability of private information on the Web, and the increase in the amount of personal information that users must reveal to obtain Web services.'"

Re:Politics that hard way

I doubt that political parties get really big money from their mailing lists. Their mailing lists let them maintain the fiction that they're battling each other for the support of ordinary people.

Meanwhile in the back rooms buying and selling of politicians goes on the old-fashioned way -- face to face.

Hardly DOS is it

The attack on the SpamKing is definitely funny. But the paper seems like an overly windy article describing how to perpetrate the old misdirected pizza/taxi cab gag on the information superhighway. While mischeiveious and a nuisance it can hardly be described as a denial of service attack now can it ? The victim ends up with a stuffed mailbox and the post office makes bank with all the additional traffic.

Also this seems a little extreme 'The attack is, to some degree, a consequence of the availability of private information on the Web, and the increase in the amount of personal information that users must reveal to obtain Web services.'

Considering the webservices the article is talking about is requesting a catalog :)

Re:Hardly DOS is it

The attack on the SpamKing is definitely funny. But the paper seems like an overly windy article describing how to perpetrate the old misdirected pizza/taxi cab gag on the information superhighway. While mischeiveious and a nuisance it can hardly be described as a denial of service attack now can it ?

Sure it can - it renders your mailbox useless, and this can be more than an irritation for people who need to be able to receive snailmail (which I suspect is most people in the United States).

Re:Hardly DOS is it

Oh, but it's DOS all right.

DOS we're familiar with = so many requests for connection that real (legitimate) requests are very slow to get through, if at all.
mailDOS = so many catalogs that finding your real mail (if there is any) is an incredible waste of time, and some pieces (packets?) may be lost (dropped) in the confusion.

If this isn't the best translation of electronic DOS to physical DOS I don't know what is.

DoS!=DOS

"Denial of Service", is the flooding of a server so that it stops functioning.
"Disk Operating System", is an OS like Windows that bases its structure upon drives rather than directories like UNIX/Linux or Mac OS do. Windows NT is still a DOS even if it (supposedly) doesn't contain MS-DOS derived code.

On a side note, DOSes seem to contribute more to server malfunctions than DoSes.

Re:Hardly DOS is it

What about possible collateral damage: did any of SpamKing's neighbors' mail delivery get slowed down (or otherwise affected)? (Is there any way to tell?)

Re:Hardly DOS is it

let's all write them letters to find out.

Re:Hardly DOS is it

Just mail him a postcard that says "PING" and see how long it takes him to reply.

Re:Hardly DOS is it

Fun little story...

I recently was out of town for a few days. The tiny little mailbox that my apartment complex provides probably filled up on the second day, so the postal carrier took all of it back to the post office, and left me a lovely note that if I didn't pick it up in a few days, they'd send it all back. Luckily I got back in time to pick up my mail, but it was definitely an inconvenience tracking down which post office outlet had my mail and then taking the time to go get it.

So for a few days my postbox was shut down (mini DOS), because the postal carrier wouldn't leave me any new mail until I found the time to pick up what had already been taken away.

anthrax

Wasn't the last DOS attack through postal service using anthrax?

Ping of death?

Wasn't the last DOS attack through postal service using anthrax?

would that be the physical incarnation of the "ping of death" attack?

More info at newscientist

It's like an executive summary [newscientist.com] of all the above links.

Lack of authentication

I could go to any bookstore's magazine section, get out the subscription cards (they aren't even physically bound to the magazine), send them off to the publishers, and check "Bill me later."

There is absolutely no way for a person to prevent against this right now.

The analog solution from the electronic world would be for the publishers send them an confirmation letter or something asking whether they really subscribed.

Re:Lack of authentication

So instead of 600 magazines in my mailbox next month, I get 600 letters asking me if I want to subscribe? Sure, it's only a one time hassle instead of a monthly hassle, but it's still annoying. And calling to confirm is no less of a pain.

Re:Lack of authentication

Not only that, but they'd probably be of the "If you don't want to subscribe, please reply" type.

Re:Lack of authentication

"There is absolutely no way for a person to prevent against this right now."

However, the recipient doesn't have to pay for any of it. It's a nuisance, but nothing like paying for bandwidth consumed by a DoS.

"The analog solution from the electronic world would be for the publishers send them an confirmation letter or something asking whether they really subscribed."

It's cheaper for them to just send out the magazine in that month's shipment. Sending out "Are you really sure?" postcards would require a different class of mail ("standard" as opposed to "periodicals") sent in a separate mailing (two smaller pre-sort batches instead of one big one). And that doesn't include the cost of a Business Reply Mail account.

Re:Lack of authentication

Y'know, maybe I'm the only one, but I got some amusement from `George Walker Bush' posting under the subject `Lack of authentication'...

NYTimes article on the paper

here [nytimes.com]

death and taxes

quick, if we slashdot the IRS via the usps, they might never get to my taxes!

Re:death and taxes

Rule #1: Never mess with the Treasury Department.
Rule #2: Never forget rule number 1.

Remember that the IRS is in the same department as ATF and the Secret Service.

this works for normal spam as well...

some users of my website have gotten pissed when they lose the game and signed up the webmaster account for tons of email offers... it is basically harassment, but easy to turn off.

yesterday as i went through *35* pieces of junk mail from 3 days i was wondering if the USPS had an opt out from certain mailers form? i doubt it because spam is how they make most of their money.

any input here?

Re:this works for normal spam as well...

yesterday as i went through *35* pieces of junk mail from 3 days i was wondering if the USPS had an opt out from certain mailers form?

The USPS does not, but the Direct Marketing Association does. Junkbusters has a sample opt-out letter [junkbusters.com] on their Web site.

So mail spamming is bad now?

So wait, whenever we the people get nailed by 2 tons of junk mail, spam mail, and get our ear talked off by telemarketers, have bill board ads vying for our eye site, and our television sets screaming at us not to mention pop up ads all over the place (unless you have a popup eliminator or use an alternative web browser, long live opera). These things are all "good" but whenever we all collectively get together and nail the hell out of spammers with the pent up rage of 2 million people who can sighn them up for nail mail garbage, it's considered wrong? I think it's nothing more than a reaction from the masses and that it should be expected, after all if they can dish it, they should be able to take it. Side note; while I know that the article doesn't neccessarily refer to the attack against spammers by the slashdot crowd, there hasn't been any other successful campaign of this type that i've ever heard of on such a scale. Time to smack them with a rolled up magazine like the bad doggies they've been

Re:Huh?

Out of curiosity, exactly what criminal law does this violate?
impersonation of an anal orifice.

Spammers have feelings!

Like the usenet spammer/advertiser I saw today that had a VALID but obfuscated email address set (for the company he was advertising). Amateurs.

Ralsky got what he deserved, and hopefully moving 'on the quiet', if he did move, cost him alot of money. I read this article earlier today (didnt think of submitting it myself) and it made alot of sense. It IS all too easy to get yourself on these lists and your life is made difficult getting off them (digging about for phone numbers listed in a 500 page catalogue's small print...) - if you were subscribed to even 100 of these you would have a mammoth task to get rid of them all.

Automated Spam attacks...

If you type the following search string into Google -- "request catalog name address city state zip" -- you'll get links to over 250,000 (the exact number varies) Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalog in the mail. Or, if you follow where this is going, you can type in the information of anyone you want. If you're a little bit clever with Perl (or any other scripting language), you can write a script that will automatically harvest the pages and fill in someone's information on all 250,000 forms. ... When you're done, voila! It's Slashdot's attack, fully automated and dutifully executed by the U.S. Postal Service.


What's the chance of setting up a perl script to automatically find Junk Mail Kings and sign them up for the service? I'm sure many of these 250,000 would be junk mail kings. Just set them on each other!

Though environmentally bad in the short term, if it shuts them down in the long term, it would save a heck of a lot of trees!

Please don't do that...

..not because of the spammers and junk mailers, but because of the legitimate businesses that you'll inevitibly be hurting.

What's the chance of setting up a perl script to automatically find Junk Mail Kings and sign them up for the service? I'm sure many of these 250,000 would be junk mail kings. Just set them on each other!

Despite the spammers, there are a lot of legitimate businesses and non-profit organisations out there that are trying to get people to sign up so they don't waste their time and money mailing people who have no interest in what they have to send.

Just because a business or organisation asks people for contact details to send mailouts doesn't mean that they're doing it maliciously. What you'll accomplish by scripting this is to give headaches to the people doing it correctly by polluting their mailing lists with people who don't want their mail. If anything, it'll have a negative effect on their customers or members who actually want to hear from them in the process, and it'll waste the resources of an organisation that often won't have a lot to waste.

This style of DoS harms more than the target

Most Denial of Service attacks affect more than the target itself. If I'm attacking example.com, then all machine between me and that machine are busy handling my traffic. An intentional DoS'ing may not be much worse than a slashdotting for an ISP, and is usually easier for them to shut down. That costs them money, but it doesn't take too long, and the only real cost is downtime of their other subscribers, which since most sites are independent of other customers or have so little bandwidth compared to the pipes coming into the ISP, doesn't affect other customers much.

In the case of signing up a spammer or other unscrupulous individiual to catalogs and other physical mail, the companies that are sending these items are directly bearing the cost of your DoS. Sure, Sears can probably afford to send out one more letter, but catalogs are more expensive to print and mail. All these companies are getting screwed out of real money, not some potentially (and oft inflated) accounting of how much time/cost an ISP has for DoS countermeasures.

Sure, I think it's great to spam the spammers, but in doing so you harm legitimate companies more than in the Internet world.

Re:This style of DoS harms more than the target

"the companies that are sending these items are directly bearing the cost of your DoS."

Costs passed on to the consumer.

"Sure, Sears can probably afford to send out one more letter, but catalogs are more expensive to print and mail."

No, they're cheaper. Instead of sending at Standard Mail [usps.gov] rates, they're either mailed at Periodicals [usps.gov] or Bound Printerd Matter [usps.gov]. And the printing is also cheaper because there's no envelope stuffing or card folding involved. And the lighter-stock paper is cheaper.

"All these companies are getting screwed out of real money"

Measured in cents or franctions of cents per recipient. And depending on how much they're shipping and where, it may actually be cheaper for them to add in a few extra addresses to bump the mailing into the next rate (we're not talking bandwidth here). The more mail they have going to a three, five or nine-digit ZIP code, the finer level of presortation they can do and the cheaper the postage for everything in that particular sack of mail.

And don't forget these mailers are interested in addresses whether you're really interested or not. If you're not giving them Ralsky's address, rest assured that they're probably interested in buying his address from his bank, credit card company, car dealer, etc. The whole philosophy of bulk mail is that you're sending this information to people who may not know they're interested in something the mailer is selling.

The worst money loss comes from paying $0.37 + fee for the Business Reply Mail card you send in. If you feel guilty, don't use the BRM card and pay for the postage yourself. (Just putting a stamp on a BRM card/envelope doesn't work unless you remember to cover/obscure the "Business Reply Mail" box above the address, the five vertical bars to the left of the "stamp" area, and all those horizontal bars along the right-hand side.)

Post office "DOS" Attack is gonna backfire

Although this is kinda funny in one isolated case, what also has to be considered is the effect on the Postal Service. Sure, they get paid to deliver this mail, but it's not that easy.

Catalogs and Magazine subscriptions ship at cheaper rates. The rural carriers that deliver mail to people's homes aren't set up to carry mass amounts of this type of mail to people; economically, the post office is set up to run with a balance of junk and first class mail on any given route.

Overload this with a hugh amount of bulk-rate junk mail, and you're putting a burden on the capacity of the carrier routes, which in turn will force the Postal Service to modify fees and/or service.

I would be highly suprised if they pass this charge on to the business customers that generate the bulk mail; this would meet with too much resistance and put pressure on the business relationship. Instead, I wager we'll see the fees passed along to first class, consumer mail either through an increase in postage fees and/or fees for home delivery of mail.

In short - The Postal Service is not the Internet. It is one orginization that can and will respond to this type of abuse, and the end result will be less service / increased cost.

Re:Post office "DOS" Attack is gonna backfire

Good. I only hope that the junkmail will be more expensive to distribute, and fewer companies will use the "service".
J.

Postbox filters

paper on Defending against an internet-based attack on the physical world

Perhaps some sort of packet filter [protectiondogs.com] on the mailbox layer might be useful.

Lawsuit Result

Here [www.cbc.ca] is an article about another Spammer vs Anti-Spammer harrasment case. Looks like some judges are on our side.

Re:Lawsuit Result

The full text follows


Anti-spam crusader wins court battle Last Updated Tue, 15 Apr 2003 15:31:49

ELLICOTT CITY, MARYLAND - A Maryland court has ruled in favour of an anti-spam activist who was sued by an Internet marketing executive for harassment. Spam is the common name given to junk e-mail.

Francis Uy posts the names and addresses of spammers. This enables network operators to block junk e-mail or sue them.

But George Allen Moore of Maryland Internet Marketing Inc. said Uy's site posting such information is harassment and wanted it pulled off the Web.

Judge Robert Wilcox says there's no evidence Uy had harassed Moore directly, as Moore had alleged.

Moore says he has received about 70 packages and 200 magazines at his house because of Uy's site. Moore also says he's received threatening phone calls, including one person who he says threatened to kill him.

Moore is the owner of Maryland Internet Marketing. He's also listed as a prolific spammer by Spamhaus.org, which maintains a world directory of bulk e-mailers.

His company hawks everything from software to diet drugs.

"Every time you try to mess with me, I will post it and more people will learn about you," Uy warned other spammers. "I don't need to encourage harassment against you, and I don't need to. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock."

Moore says he's considering further legal action.

This is a serious issue

Sure, the Ralsky attack is funny and ironic and all, but imagine if it happened to you. This wouldn't be a pizza delivery or Playgirl subscription every now and then, we're talking *pounds* of mail every day from many, many sources (God! your mailman would *hate* you). Easy to initiate, not easy to trace and really hard to stop.

Also, you can't write filters to automatically route or categorize snail mail. You have to go through it all to find the non-spam. If this kind of attack catches on, watch out.

I'm interested, is there anyone out there that works for the Postal Service? How can victims deal with this sort of thing?

no, it is not

Sure, the Ralsky attack is funny and ironic and all, but imagine if it happened to you.

Well, if you piss off people, they may try to get back at you. The Ralsky attack is the result of Ralsky pissing off a lot of people an each person engaging in a small and individually harmless act. In comparison to the kind of disputes among neighbors and individuals that often occur in the real world, that seems both harmless and unprosecutable. Welcome to the real world.

If you piss off a lot of people for justifiable reasons (e.g., you are the author of Satanic Verses), then some concerned government may try to help you out. Otherwise, the solution is simple: don't piss off too many people.

Be Aware...

It just goes to show that people should be very careful with their personal information.

Sincerely,

Guy LeBarge
186 Rideau St.
Ottawa, ON
K1A 25U

Re:Be Aware...

So what did this Guy LeBarge dude do to piss you off? ;)

The paper..

Anyone except me that see the irony in the fact that those who wrote the paper Defending against an internet-based attack on the physical world [avirubin.com] displays their physichal world location on the top of the paper?

It's Not Ironic...

It's poetic justice. From dictionary.com:

"...and the punishment of vice, often in an especially appropriate or ironic manner. "

So you see, this is poetic justice, not irony. That said, I'm not mad about this happening to him, is anyone else?

re: Google and DOS Attack Via US Postal Service

He suggests that you type "request catalog name address city state zip" into Google whereupon Google will kick back some 250,000 pages with online web forms to fill out.

Google now kicks back one hit - the article itself...

You really have to strip your search down before it starts returning anything.

Re: Google and DOS Attack Via US Postal Service

I always wondered why instructions contained phrases like:

Now type "somecommand" (without the quotes).

Now I know....

One variation on the same theme

This is nothing new. Back 20 years ago or so, my father (heh!) used to collect old newspapers at airports, then he would fold 3 or 4 newspapers together into a very thick enveloppe and send this without stamps to a person of his choice that he disliked at this time.

That worked well because where we lived, enveloppes without a return address and without stamps were delivered allright, and had to be paid in full by the receiving party for the cost of shipping plus a penalty fee for not stamping the mail in the first place.

I doubt that he's ever made someone loose great amounts of money, but that must have annoyed the hell out of those people receiving junk and having to pay for it !

Maybe somebody would realize that it is serious...

...when they understand the real-world equivalent. He's one man being DDoS'd, online almost everybody with a reasonably public email address is DDoS'd. I've got a university account, that has never been posted to mailing-lists, usenet, forums but is fairly accessible from the university homepage (student cataloges etc.) SPAM is on the rise, and that's a mail address I can't change to [e-mail] just to get away, any more than I could move away to avoid being spammed in the real world. Neither can businesses and others with the need for a static and publicly accessible address.

At least the catalogs he's getting have a real return address. I hate spam with fake sender, and I hope someone will soon enforce that domain.com must come from a domain.com mail server (or through one with authentication) and start the snowball running. If you can't send through the domain.com mail server, why should anyone believe you have the right to send mail for [e-mail]? The default "trust anyone" is one of the big signs e-mail was designed for "serious" use by "serious" people before the general public started using and abusing it.

Kjella

How about a digital pager DDOS attack?

Take:

• One phone number (the victim)
• One war dialer
• Many, many pager numbers

Empirically, 1000 pagers (at 3-4 dial sequences per minute) equals about 4 days of constant calls to the vicitim's phone. How I know this is another discussion...

Of course, this was more effective when digital pagers were much, much more popular. Today, it probably wouldn't go over as well, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, it worked flawlessly. Essentially, it was distributed crank calling before the "DDOS" term was coined.

The most interesting part was that the pager companies explicitly refused to do anything about it. No tracing of calls, no attempts to halt sequential dialing, etc. Not their problem.

retaliatory postal spamming works

I work for a scummy direct marketing company, and can tell you that when people mail back dog shit, dead cats, bricks, etc. it really does slow business down because that mail is not sorted from the legitimate mail. From time to time the bomb squad is even called in to check an unexpected parcel and that can gum up the whole works.

From The Spamhaus Project

Alan Ralsky aliases and addresses [spamhaus.org].

Seems like his "real" address is:
Alan Murray Ralsky
6747 Minnow Pond Dr,
West Bloomfield,
MI 48322
Telephone: [phone]
Current email address: [e-mail]

The positive side of REAL junk mail

Years ago, I read about a guy who intentionally signed up for as many catalogs and other junk mail as possible. I think he got 200 lbs a day. He heats his house with it.

Property value

Theoretically they may have lowered the value of his house upon resale. Like murders or other infamous events in a house it's the sellers responsibility to inform the buyer or the deal can be busted at a later date. So the spammer must inform the next buyer that they may recieve a monthly flood of "For Alan Ralsky or current occupant" mail. I know I would think twice about moving into a cursed address.

This calls for some testing...

Anyone know Bill Gates' home address?

Got Ralsky's Home Number? or Fax Number?

If we could get any of these, we could have some serious fun!

First - get his fax number into some key marketing/questionaire databases and blamo! - Fax Spam Ahoy!

Second - Setup a couple of "Faxback" server attacks on those numbers. Faxback servers are fantastic because they're realllly dumb. Call them up on an toll-free number and order up a mess of documents to be faxed to wherever you want. The best part is that they're relentless - they will just keep on calling (up to 10 times) to try to make a connection ... i.e. "ring ring - 'hello, Ralsky here' - *beep* *beep* - hang up - repeat 5 minutes later"

Its mega-annoying - especially if you get a couple of them going at once - and at 3AM

But heck ... we should at least be able to get this douchebag's fax number for his company - yes?

Wouldn't it be more effective...

to determine the business addresses that those who actually respond to his spam would be sending their checks too and swamp those? Spammers depend on a very low operational cost model to make money. If they have to sort through 100s of items of mail for every one that has a check in it, you've just increased their cost of doing business.

If they're doing most of their business electronically, publishing a list of their SSL sites could be interesting. If we all ran something to walk the list once an hour and just make a connection to the SSL sites and leave it, they'd be effectively down. Negotiating the SSL connections has a high computing cost on their side.

If someone were to design a virus that does that and continuously checks into sites for new lists, I might actually try to get the virus.

In other words, if you want to have a real effect, go for cutting off the money.

The only one who hates us more than Ralsky

The only one who hates us more than Ralsky
Is his postman. Can you imagine all the huge stacks of spam he has to haul up to the mailbox? Geeze, I bet by now he almost has a seperate bag...

At least sign the guy up to Playboy so that the postman has something interesting to "obtain" from the sack 'o' mail he must have to deliver on a regular basis.

Some history,,,,

The post [slashdot.org] that started it all.
And a previous story [slashdot.org] on slashdot.

Re:Lex Talionis is a morally bankrupt code

Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully.

Wrong. Lex Talionis was the principle that you take NO MORE than an eye for an eye - promulgated as an "improvement" in an era where the response to losing an eye (or a purse) might be to do in the alleged perpetrator and confiscate all his worldly goods.

It's morally bankrupt, all right. But only to the extent that if the thief only loses what he stole, and has a nonzero chance of getting away with it, theft remains a profitmaking enterprise despite full enforcement of the law. So it becomes an endorsement of theft as a lifestyle. This is why there are "puntitive damages" - extra penalties to punish the perpetrator (thus making continued misbehavior a losing proposition even with imperfect law enforcement).

None of which applies here. Applying "Lex Talionis" to the spammer would mean spamming him, rather than seeking compensatory and puntitive damages.

===

Which is what they did, isn't it? B-)

===

Lex Talionis also recognizes a moral principal of equivalency, to wit: In an egalitarian society, regardless of what actions you think are fair, you have NO moral gripe if someone does to YOU what YOU did to them. If it was wrong for them to do in retaliation, it was AT LEAST as wrong for YOU to do without provocation.

===

I note, by the way, that your posting is IDENTICAL to one you made several [slashdot.org] times [slashdot.org] previously [slashdot.org] - including in the slashdot article credited with inspring the USPS DDoS attack in the first place. (And that last one I cited was under your own slashdot ID of Chuck Flynn [slashdot.org].) Given that, I felt free to repeat, almost verbatim, my response to your most recent previous missive.

The posts that recieve your canned response seem to be any suggestion about spamming the spammers. You wouldn't happen to be a spammer, would you?