Attacking spammers by drowning them in paper

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The worst attacks made using computer networks are those able to influence our daily lives. On this subject Aviel D. Rubin, Simon Byers and David Kormann have published a scientific paper on computer security at the Johns Hopkins University titled ‘Defending Against anInternet-based Attack on the Physical World‘. It describes a fairly simple software, written by this team, which can be used to subscribe the victim to a huge quantity of advertising catalogs through their websites. The program automates a real case happened to Alan Ralsky, also known as ‘spam king’ who, after bragging on the Boston Globe about the money he made sending hundreds of millions of unsolicited commercial emails, saw his real-life mailbox clogged by tons of advertising papers after his interview was reported on Slashdot. This paper describes the danger of this practice, which, if taken to an extreme, can easily paralyze an entire local post office. The authors describe other similar attacks, such as maintenance requests, requests to retire a package or service calls, which can be rendered ineffective by improving the software used by the servers handling automatic requests, therefore patching another possible hole between the virtual and the real worlds.