Novel use of Usenet and remailers to mailbomb from luzskru@cpcnet.com

[abostick@netcom.com (Alan Bostick)]

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Somebody, too clever for their own good by half, has come up with a
novel way of using Usenet and anonymous remailers to perpetrate
mailbombs.  The M.O. is to post a message to the naked-lady newsgroups
saying "get pics in your mailbox! send this message to this address!),
giving the email address of a cypherpunk-style anonymous remailer and
including a pgp-encrypted message block.

Thousands of horny net geeks will send in the message; some of them 
will even follow instructions correctly so the remailer forwards the
message to its intended target.  The result is that the target will
be mailbombed -- and the remailer operator can't stop the abuse by
blocking the abuser's address, because it's coming from all over the
net.  

There is *no* chance that this is legitimate.  The remailer discards the
original message header.  There is no way for the recipient to know who
sent the email message.

Cypherpunks:  is there any way to respond to, or prevent, this sort of
attack short of actually shutting down the remailer?  

What comes to my mind is the remailer operator grepping for a character
string of ASCII-armored cyphertext from the known attack message and
throwing messages containing it into the bit-bucket.  It is highly
unlikely that this would appear in any message except the attack
message.  The problem with this is that it works only for a known attack
message -- it can shut down an ongoing attack, but it can't prevent new
ones.

I am including the widely-crossposted attack message below, including headers.

   Alan Bostick             | He played the king as if afraid someone else 
Seeking opportunity to      | would play the ace.
develop multimedia content. |      John Mason Brown, drama critic
Finger abostick@netcom.com for more info and PGP public key

> Xref: netcom.com alt.sex:292849 alt.sex.wizards:44144 alt.sex.magazines:11634 alt.binaries.pictures.erotica:364153 alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.blondes:48686 alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female:130066 alt.sex.movies:91249 alt.sex.pictures:98757
> Newsgroups: alt.sex,alt.sex.wizards,alt.sex.magazines,alt.binaries.pictures.erotica,alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.blondes,alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female,alt.sex.movies,alt.sex.pictures
> Path: netcom.com!ix.netcom.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!nuclear.microserve.net!luzskru.cpcnet.com!www-39-190
> From: luzskru@cpcnet.com (luzskru)
> Subject: Get Penthouse and Playboy pics on your mail box!!
> Message-ID: <1b7cc$12a26.20@luzskru.cpcnet.com>
> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 18:10:37 GMT
> Organization: http://www.cpcnet.com/~luzskru/home.htm
> X-Newsreader: News Xpress Version 1.0 Beta #4
> Lines: 119
> 
> Follow these instructions.  
> 1) paste everything between the -------- into the body of your message. Be 
> sure to leave the first line blank and include everything including the ::
> 2) Send the message to homer@rahul.net
> 3) as the subject, specify playboy or penthouse and the month.
> 4) if you don't get the file within a few hours, then send it again and be 
> sure that you didn't do something wrong.  Here is the message:
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> 
> ::
> Encrypted: pgp
> 
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> =TKgw
> -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Include everthing between the ------------------------------- and you will get
> the pictures in your mail box.
> 
> 

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