[iwar] news
From: Fred Cohen
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Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 07:46:23 -0800 (PST)
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Subject: [iwar] news
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E-mail `bombing' jams Broward County Elections Office Web site
By JEREMY MILARSKY, Sun-Sentinel
Web-posted: 10:23 p.m. Nov. 29, 2000
FORT LAUDERDALE -- He or she thinks the folks in the Broward County
Supervisor of Elections Office "are all a bunch of crooks," and wrote
them an e-mail telling them so.
About 30,000 times.
And that's what shut down the Internet server that supports the Broward
County Supervisor of Elections Web site and e-mail server earlier this
week.
The Web site, www.browardsoe.org, was down for more than a day until
someone fixed it Wednesday morning, said David Beirne, assistant to the
supervisor. The server was up and working by Wednesday afternoon.
"It exceeded our capacity," Beirne said. "I think they've been sent
over a period of days."
Every one of the e-mails has the same message, and the sender identifies
himself or herself as "Gore Al."
"You are all a bunch of crooks and we are watchin (sic) this on National
Television," the sender wrote. "The election process in your county has
been exposed as a dishonest deomcratically (sic) biased process with
absolutely no standards."
The act of sending thousands of e-mails in an attempt to disable an
Internet server is known as "e-mail bombing." The messages are normally
"bounced" off a computer server other than the sender's to mask the
sender's identity.
In this case, the sender wrote his or her return e-mail address as
"algore@algore.com."
The messages began flooding in "sometime over the weekend," when the
Broward County Canvassing Board was scrambling to complete a hand
recount of votes for the contested race for the presidency between
Democrat Al Gore and GOP candidate George W. Bush, Beirne said.
E-mail bombings are not all that unusual in the world of computer crime,
because the act doesn't require hacking into a target computer server.
The elections supervisor's Web page, for example, was never infiltrated,
although Beirne said staff members have fixed their server to prevent
the same thing from happening again.
"It's really not all that unusual," said David Carlson, a professor of
interactive media at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "It's
not very difficult to do. A large number of private corporations have
been the victim of this practice."
But attacking a government server can bring more serious penalties than
trying to bring down a private company's Web site, said Michael
Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.
"Because it's a government computer, the crime is more serious than with
a private computer," Froomkin said.
Beirne said Wednesday he has no plans to report the matter to police.
Jeremy Milarsky can be reached at jmilarsky@sun-sentinel.com or call
954-572-2020.
--
Fred Cohen at Sandia National Laboratories at tel:925-294-2087 fax:925-294-1225
Fred Cohen & Associates: http://all.net - fc@all.net - tel/fax:925-454-0171
Fred Cohen - Practitioner in Residence - The University of New Haven
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