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British NHS DDOS attacks itself via email sent to 1.2M staff
- misframer 10y agoReminds me of the "Bedlam DL3" story from Microsoft [0]. [0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-too/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...
- 0xmohit 10y agoSomewhat odd that in setups this large emails to all are unregulated. I'd expect those to go through some "approval" channel.
- astrodust 10y agoCan anyone explain why people leave their servers configured to allow arbitrarily long To: lists? Any large organization is just one mistake away from a Reply-All apocalypse.
- Shanea93 10y agoAt the very least, the operations accounts, security, newsletters and Simon Stevens himself should have the ability to send a network-wide email - outside of that there's no good reason for Johnny intern to be sending an email to that many people.
- bcraven 10y agoThis may be a mailing list, rather than a simple 'Reply-All' thing (and the media have misunderstood). The reply box will be a single address if that's the case.
- astrodust 10y agoIf so, there's ways of limiting who can address that address and in so doing spam the entire company.
- ljf 10y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950830
- rcarmo 10y agoThis is reminiscent of at least one IT Crowd episode (I forget the title), and so typical...
- eggie5 10y agoThis happened at Qualcomm once. Some IT email was sent out to most of the corp and then people's vacation/out-of-office auto-reply-to-all propagated it more. Then people would send reply-all messages like "remove me from this list!" it went on for most of the day.
- dudus 10y agoAlso happened at IBM when I worked there. A guy named Armando changed his phone and manage to send a notice to everyone in the company using a maillist. People didn't know about the maillist and started to ask to be removed, turns out it was not possible... It took weeks to solve and everyone at IBM pretty much lost access to email during the period due to the overload. Even worse, at the time a lot of internal systems at IBM were based in Lotus Notes that is a weird framework email client mashup and those systems were also affected. This happened in 2007
- mhays 10y agoThis is not a ddos attack. More like ddos mistake or accident.
- johansch 10y agoTwo stories about this topic on the front-page right now. Merge them?