RAND_MR1382

incident. 80
The email bombing consisted of about 800 emails a day for about two weeks. William
Church, editor for the Centre for Infrastructural Warfare Studies (CIWARS), observed
that
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil are desperate for publicity and they got exactly what they wanted … considering the
routinely deadly attacks committed by the Tigers, if this type of activity distracts them from bombing and killing
then CIWARS would like to encourage them, in the name of peace, to do more of this type of “terrorist” activity. 81
The attack, however, was said to have had the desired effect of generating fear in the
embassies.
During the Kosovo conflict, protestors on both sides email bombed government sites.
According to PA News, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the NATO server had been
saturated at the end of March by one individual who was sending 2,000 messages a
day. 82 Fox News reported that when California resident Richard Clark heard of attacks
against NATO’s web site by Belgrade hackers, he retaliated by sending an email bomb to
the Yugoslav government’s site. Clark said that a few days and 500,000 emails into the
siege, the site went down. He did not claim full responsibility but said he “played a
part.” That part did not go unrecognized. His Internet service provider, Pacific Bell, cut
off his service, saying his actions violated their spamming policy. 83
An email bombing was conducted against the San Francisco–based Internet service
provider Institute for Global Communications (IGC) in 1997 for hosting the web pages
of the Euskal Herria Journal, a controversial publication edited by a New York group
supporting independence of the mountainous Basque provinces of northern Spain and
southwestern France. Protestors claimed IGC “supports terrorism” because a section on
the web pages contained materials on the terrorist group Fatherland and Liberty, or
ETA, which was responsible for killing over 800 people during its nearly 30-year
struggle for an independent Basque state. The attack against IGC began after members
of the ETA assassinated a popular town councilor in northern Spain. 84
The protestors’ objective was censorship. They wanted the site pulled. To get their way,
they bombarded IGC with thousands of bogus messages routed through hundreds of
different mail relays. As a result, mail was tied up and undeliverable to IGC’s email
users, and support lines were tied up with people who couldn’t get their mail. The
attackers also spammed IGC staff and member accounts, clogged their web page with
bogus credit card orders, and threatened to employ the same tactics against
organizations using IGC services. The only way IGC could stop the attack was by
blocking access from all of the relay servers. 85
IGC pulled the site on July 18, but not before archiving a copy so that others could put
up mirrors. Within days of the shutdown, mirror sites appeared on half a dozen servers