Cyber vandal takes UUNet off the air for a week

One of the world's biggest Internet companies was brought to a standstill for almost a week by a computer hacker who bombarded it with more than two million emails in a "matter of minutes".

Internet service provider UUNet has been unable to distribute emails to millions of British Internet users after being hit six days ago by one of the most rampant cases of suspected cyber-vandalism so far.

The mass "spamming" happened when more than two million unsolicited messages arrived in UUNet's system at the same time, causing it to crash.

UUNet, a subsidiary of WorldCom, provides email services for some of the best-known companies in the Internet, including AOL and MSN.

The chaos has meant that millions of messages to companies and Net users have been delayed for days.

UUNet has declined to reveal the contents of the email, understood to be a commercial offer, but it was not pornographic.

It has hired a team of Internet security specialists to try to track down the source of the spam, believed to be from someone in North America. "This is the biggest problem we've ever had to confront in terms of email," it said.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/17/bizcom/bizcom5.html

In Britain, spammers have been prosecuted successfully under the Computer Misuse Act.

The Daily Telegraph, London

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 16, 2001