Commercial spamflooding used by crooks to tie up their victims at key moments

Security expert Brian Krebs was the target of a malicious email flood, and writes firsthand about the experience. These floods -- which can be directed at any and all of your phone (voice or SMS) and email -- are used by crooks who want to busy-out all their victims' communications channels while they are ripping them off electronically. This kind of flooding is available as a (surprisingly cheap) commercial service.

Used mostly in private for myself and now offered to the respected public.
Spam using bots, having decent SMTP accounts.
Doing email floods using bots. Complete randomization of the letter, so the user could not block the flood by the signatures.
Flooder is capable of the following functionality:
Huge wave of emails is being instantly sent to the victim. (depending on the server load and amount of emails to be flooded)
Delivery rate of 60-65% — depending on the SMTP servers.
Limit for flooding single email account on this server is 100,000 emails.
Plan – Children – 25,000 emails — $25
Plan – Medium – 50,000 emails — $40
Plan – Hard – 75,000 emails — $55
Plan – Monster – 100,000 emails — $70

Cyberheist Smokescreen: Email, Phone, SMS Floods

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Business • crime • security • spam • web theory

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http://profiles.google.com/stephen.schenck Stephen Schenck

Boing Boing is one post away from a Krebs trifecta today!
http://boingboing.net/2012/07/19/weird-medical-history-ripped.html

May I suggest something Pete & Pete related?
http://pnp.norecess.org/kreb.html
- http://twitter.com/GlennF Glenn Fleishman
  
  You must be the … strongest man in the world to suggest that.
ablebody

krebs walks into a seedy bar, and the bartender says “what’ll ya have?” krebs orders a full bottle of mezcal tequila, opens it, and pours the contents on the floor. the dumbfounded barkeep has to know why he did it, and krebs replies “just here to remove a worm.”
Rhyolite

Hmmm…doesn’t Marcus do something like this to another classmate early in Little Brother creating a diversion so he and his friends sneak out of class?
http://fallsastar.com Crashproof

This sounds very Shadowrun. Tie up the corporate network to cause a distraction while your team sneaks in to kidnap/rescue/recruit a talented employee who’s been working on a brilliant unauthorized side project. Plus orks.
http://twitter.com/andyhunt Andy Hunt

What happened to the good ol’ days, when all a fella had to do was download a copy of Unabomber off a super shady warez site???