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Definition[]

Email bombing involves attackers repeatedly sending an email message to a particular email address at a victim's site. In many instances, the message will be large and constructed from meaningless data in an effort to consume large amounts of system and network resources. Multiple accounts at the target site may be attacked, increasing the denial of service impact.

Overview[]

Email bombing is a type of denial of service attack (DoS). A DoS attack by definition either prevents authorized access to resources or causes delay (e.g., long response times) of time-critical operations. Hence email bombing is a major availability threat to an email system since it can potentially consume substantial Internet bandwidth as well as storage space in the message stores of recipients. An email bombing attack can be launched in several ways:

Spam is one type email bombing.

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