Numerous news wires and blogs reported a serious email problem at the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that resulted in a tidal wave of emails between about 7,500 department employees and external security professionals; said to have generated over 2 million email messages on Wednesday alone.

“The Department of Homeland Security self-inflicted what one observer called a mini distributed denial of service, with a reported mass of more than 2.2 million messages stuffing the inboxes of the nation’s security experts.”

Once again, the troubles started with the unintentional use of the infamous Reply-to-all button by a DHS employee. The employee was simply trying to change his email address on a department mailing list server, accidentally sending the request to all subscribers.

“In the hour that followed, dozens of readers replied to the exposed list of recipients, causing the “mini-DDoS” with demands to unsubscribe, pleas to others to cease replying, urgent requests from the Department of Defense and DHS officials for recipients to “kindly stop now please,” a “vote for me” political ad, job offers and updates on the local weather.”

The incident highlights again the importance of monitoring and safeguarding messaging infrastructures with tools that can prevent incidents like this and their aftermath from occurring.

Technorati Tags: dhs, dod, email storm, email flood

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. An RSS Subscription will deliver new Blog posts automatically to your computer.
Thanks for visiting!