What is an Email Bomb?
Email bombing is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that overloads the victim’s inbox with messages until their inbox is rendered useless. This type of cyberattack can cause a variety of problems, including slowing down or crashing email servers, using up a large amount of network resources, and potentially causing harm to the recipient’s computer or network.
The perpetrators of email bombing often use automated tools to send hundreds or thousands of emails in a matter of seconds, making it difficult for the target to stop the attack. Email bombing is illegal and can result in severe penalties, including fines and jail time.
Email Bombs Disguises:
Web Newsletters and Form Sign-up Verification: Many hackers use vulnerable websites and sign-up verification forms without live-user authentication features to plant the bomb.
Dark Web: Hackers can find your emails on the dark web and use these for email bomb attacks. Agency’s free dark web scan can help you see if your information has been hacked.
Types of Email Bombs:
Attachment Attack: Large attachments are included on emails that take up your server storage space and can later render it unresponsive.
Link Listing Attack: the target’s email will be used to sign up for email subscription services.
Mass Mailing Attack: a network-connected user sends emails to all contacts or fills online forms with the victim’s email address.
Reply All Attack: uses a target email address to send responses to an entire email list.
Zip Bomb Attack: a large file is compressed into a zip file, where once opened, the file takes up space and slows down the server.
How to Protect Yourself from Email Bombing:
It is important to take steps to prevent email bombing. This can include setting up filters to block messages from certain addresses, limiting the number of emails that can be sent from a single address, and using anti-spam software to detect and block suspicious messages. Additionally, individuals should be careful when providing their email address online, and should not respond to messages from unknown senders.
Use a mail filter to filter out subscription-based emails that you did not sign up for. You can also use spam filters to filter out potential email bombs.
Use opt-in and CAPTCHA to stop BOTs from abusing your email before it begins to flood your inbox. By doing so, the BOTs cannot auto-submit your email address to forms.
Agency offers services that can protect device users from email bombing. Agency has a personal identification removal service, which makes it more challenging for hackers to find your information online. This will make you less susceptible to a cyber attack. In addition, if you accidentally click on a malicious link in an Email Bomb, you will be protected by Agency’s Personalized Managed enterprise-grade cybersecurity.
